On the Downside - from Pouilly to Montbard

We may be on the downside of the Canal de Bourgogne but the temperature’s definitely on the way up. We’ve left the green forests behind and are now into rich farmland where gold is the predominant hue. Farm machines are everywhere. If you can’t see them you can hear them every hour of the long summer day (except lunchtime of course). There seems to be a machine for everything and all look new. They’re out in the fields cutting, turning and baling the ripe hay –jobs that once took many people days to complete are now finished in a few hours.

 Tractors pulling laden trailers constantly clatter across the canal bridges and through the villages leaving a trail of hay sprigs or cereal dust in their wake. One sight that can’t fail to cheer is the field filled with hundreds of thousands of bright sunflowers which turn in unison, each like a hand mirror to the blazing sun tracking across the sky.

It has been a little while and a lot of locks since the last blog post. Going downhill is much easier than going up but we have had a few long, tiring days nevertheless. I am writing this in Tanlay which is 53km and 89 locks from Pouilly (the summit and from where I last wrote).  We have been accompanied by teams of itinerant lock keepers over all but the last few. This generally works fairly well but it does mean you have to book a setting off time (usually 9am) and decide on an appropriate stopping place. Sometimes there’s not a lot of choice about the latter. Most of the locks are hard work with heavy gates which have to be manually opened and if there’s only one keeper one of us always gets off to help. I don’t know what the recruiting process is but some of the hardest locks seem to be the responsibility of the smallest, weakest keepers and then you get to an automatic, push button lock and the pusher of the button is a strapping, muscle bound, young man. Perhaps he got that way after working his way up.

And then there was this young eclusier who deserves a mention. He would seem to have lost so much weight due to his morning’s exertions that, by the afternoon when we went through, his clothes were falling off him. He could almost qualify for one of those facebook ‘weird dieting tips’.

We had a couple of days in Montbard over the Bastille Day holiday. The celebrations here were fairly low key. There were fireworks but somewhere in the distance. The area around the canal port in Montbard is not particularly picturesque and if we hadn’t been forced to stay we probably would have just spent one night – which would have been a pity as we’d have missed seeing an old, as yet un-prettified town with a picturesque river and lovely park around the remains of a chateau on top of another of those steep hills.

We are now in Chateau country which I’ll tell you about in the next post.