The city of Milton Keynes provokes mixed reactions, but as far as we can see the people who actually live there seem to like it a lot. Swallowing up, or surrounding several old villages like Fenny Stratford and Bletchley, it covers a large area; the canal snakes around the Eastern and Northern boundaries with glimpses housing estates or even The Open University,  but it’s pretty much all parks or woods or walking areas along the canal so you never feel you’re close to a big city.

Fenny Stratford provides the last lock on the descent into Milton Keynes and a long lock free pound. The drop is only thirteen inches, and there’s a swing bridge across the middle of the lock: a lot of effort for such a little descent.

You occasionally see people running businesses from boats: we’d already encountered fuel sellers and the honey-cart boat that services the area from Rickmansworth to Milton Keynes. You see boats advertising traditional fenders, a mobile bookshop seemed to make the news recently, tea shops, and all sorts of other types. Some friends of ours who liked making exotic bread had even explored the possibility of a narrowboat bakery, but the logistics proved a little fearsome.   And that morning The Cheese Boat passed us en-route to Leighton Buzzard.

Even so, we were impressed by the striking looking Vanitas: a mobile tattoo parlour and signwriter no less. The Captain suggested we stop and I get some rabbits tattooed on my forehead, in the hope that people might mistake them for hares, but there didn’t appear to be anyone in. The Captain went without lunch.

Climbing up to the Aylesbury Arm junction, then starting back on the descent, Tuesday saw 13 locks pass slowly: quite enough. The journey is quite pleasant, with views across the Chilterns to Dunstable Downs and the like.

The rather fine paintwork on Sweet Painted Lady was reminiscent of the old WWII Bomber nose art, particularly given the old Airstream caravan parked in the field.

Water had always been a consideration around here, and at several places the canal company built a second, parallel narrow beam lock, partly to improve traffic flow, but mainly so that solo narrowboats didn’t waste as much water. The locks are long disused, but the double-arched bridges are still there.

With the slowly increasing distances between locks as we come off the hill, the Chief Engineering Officer had time to think, and was getting concerned that we needed an engine service and oil change. A phone call down canal to Wyvern Boats – the local hire company – established that they had the bits and would be happy to accommodate us as long as it wasn’t one of their change-over days, so we arranged to slow down, and arrive at their wharf mid-morning on the Thursday for a few hours engineering TLC and thumb-twiddling.

Stopping the previous evening near Grove Lock, where there’s a pleasant Fuller’s pub serving food, it was clear that CaRT’s towpath maintenance had gone awry. We got moored up eventually, but with all the gardening required forgot to take any pictures.

Memo to Captain: we need a few extra items for the ship’s inventory, sir. 1 scythe, 1 strimmer, 1 pair of shears, 1 flamethrower…

Since leaving Cropredy (at what seems a very long time ago) we’d seen very little boating traffic apart from sunny weekend cruisers on the Thames and the occasional travellers like us. As it was now mid-July, some schools were already out, and Wyvern had quite a few boats gathering dust on the wharf we wondered if the hire boat industry was in terminal decline. But no. Wyvern said they had 35 boats, so there were about 25 out, and nearly all their customers headed North as there were so many locks heading South (as we knew!)

Wyvern’s wharf is pretty much in the middle of Leighton Buzzard, and with ten or more boats expected to arrive the next morning long before the Captain and Cook normally stir themselves, after a wander round town and checking out the cook’s favourite supermarket, we beat a hasty retreat a little down the canal to somewhere likely to be less chaotic.

… or nearly so. The locks of most of the canals we’ve travelled in the past have by-washes, so that if the pound above the lock has too much water, it flows down a culvert or channel around the lock into the pound below. Coming up the Grand Union from Brentford, and compounded by rivers joining and departing the navigation, several times we found water overflowing the lock gates. There’s a picture here.

In some cases the “bible” (Nicholson’s Guide) advises against mooring in certain pounds due to highly variable water levels. We’d avoided one such pound coming up to the summit, mooring a couple of pounds below, only to find the next morning we were thoroughly aground, and tilting over enough that the shower water didn’t stay in in the shower tray. With some pre-breakfast cursing and swearing, and the first ever use of the Song & Dance barge pole in anger we got waterborne and made it to the next lock. Dragged our bottom all through next pound, only to find that the following one – the one with the caution – had several moorers still afloat, plenty of water and no problems. Oh well…

The lockkeeper at Aylesbury also warned things were getting a bit difficult on the main line, as one of the back-pumping systems had gone U-S, and warned us about mooring in several other places too. But heading back up from Aylesbury, again we found plenty of overflowing water, apart from one pound where again we were dragging the bottom and were quite relieved to reach the lock at the end. (We subsequently found this pound had sprung a leak somewhere).

Coming back down the main line again, again there have been several pounds where the levels looked a little low, but not enough to cause concern. Fingers crossed there’s enough water to get us where we going…

It’s all very well mooring next to a Waitrose – you can get fresh croissants for breakfast – but when you lose track of the days and find (a) it’s Sunday, (b) they don’t open until 11:00 and (c) the weather is inclement, then the promised early start never happened, and we didn’t get off until after lunch. Much the same happened the next day, so we had plenty of time to reflect on the Aylesbury Arm of the Grand Union.

It descends/climbs through pleasantly remote countryside, but it’s not that quiet: there are loads of old narrow canal bridges carrying roads across: they’re all little country lanes, but with relatively lots of traffic, so being anywhere near a bridge means being subject to a fairly constant barrage of “beep beep beep”s from vehicles going too fast and adopting the Italian approach to collision avoidance on hump-backed bridges. And due to the wonders of SatNavs and lorry drivers too mean to buy the more expensive commercial versions, watching a 44 tonne artic trying to negotiate a small brick bridge that’s hundreds of years old makes you wonder why there are no obvious weight restrictions, and glad you aren’t underneath at the time.

The (many) locks are a bit neglected, too. The grass areas around the lock are rough, untended, and present plenty of tripping risks, while the concrete or brick edges to the lock are pretty rough and crumbling, and in some cases seem to be coming away altogether. This happened a couple of years ago at Lock 12 when the lock wall collapsed completely, resulting in the arm being shut for months; CaRT had to crane out quite a few boats stick between there and the town as there was no other way out. One local retailer remarked that boat traffic has never recovered on that section: one can see why.

So, in iffy weather, we slowly climbed our way back up to the main line, then resumed our descent off the Chilterns.