Shiel's travel agent (me) didn't plan today's walk with enough care. Ordinance Survey 1 in 50,000 maps are not sufficiently detailed for canal walks through Birmingham. Be warned! It helps to know what canal you're supposed to be following. As a result we went wrong, twice. The first one I was aware of, the second one I wasn't. As a result we finished walking 15 miles today. The good news is we saw some interesting bits of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal entering Birmingham which we would have missed if we'd followed the correct route.
We got off early leaving the 'Rollason Wood Hotel' at 9:00am and it was all downhill to the canal which we reached in 20 minutes. It was cool, but sunny, and it had obviously rained quite heavily in the night judging by the size of puddles near the road.
The path initially gave no impression of being in a big city passing through green trees but that changed quickly as we went below an urban area in a massive concrete tunnel.
We passed beside the M6 and the traffic noise was quite unpleasant. It was under the M6 that we found the mostly, for you, illegible sign which I misunderstood and made the first mistake of the day.
I mistakenly thought we should keep on The Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, I was wrong. However I found out in about 15 minutes but carried on as it was an alternative route south and also marked on my map as a cycle/greenway. It was very narrow to start with running through an aqueduct over the river Tame but soon widened again.
The surroundings were initially remarkably rural but soon became urban, and after about one hour on the canal, when we were passing a lock climbing into Bimingham, quite industrial.
Twenty minutes and many lock later we arrived at the bridge shown below. It switched the towpath from the LHS to the RHS of the canal. We went across it. That was our mistake. We should have turned left down the Digbeth branch canal. We were at Aston Junction.
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