James Tucker in Cov

Otters! Including some babies. Apparently they work in packs and are fairly brutish little things. Who knew?


I assume this guy is at least as lucky as the Albino Kingston Squirrel. Probably more.


And there are lemurs for good measure, too.

So my family came to visit a few weeks ago, and we rented a canal boat and headed along the Llangollen canal to (surprise) Llangollen, which is Wales. Although essentially a floating motel, the canal boat is a very slow floating motel, and so we got a chance to get a good look at the scenery. Although it was what you'd expect from the English countryside, and later more mountainous Welsh, the weather was anything but normal. It was hot. In fact, it was apparently the hottest a July has ever been in the UK. This added a certain dimension to the entire project, but we managed to make it through. I also, foolishly perhaps, went on a series of bike rides on the roads around the canals.
As the canal heads into Wales, the landscape starts getting a little more varied. In order to manage without too many locks, the canal was built (in the 1800s) with a series of aquaducts and tunnels, often one right after the other. They are real landmarks, and it's quite something to be a hundred feet over a field of sheep on a boat. Chirk (top), which is the border between England and Wales, has an aquaduct leading right into a 400 metre tunnel (the picture at the bottom of the post was taken from the boat as we headed towards the tunnel). The aquaduct runs beside and slightly below a later rail viaduct built on the same route. It's also home to an enormous castle. Impressive as that is, it's not even the biggest one on the route- the aquaduct at Pontycyllte (right) is close to 1000 metres long and 130 feet high (how's that for mixing measurements?).
Once across that, it wasn't far to Llangollen itself, a nice tourist town dominated by the remains of a castle (seen above the canal, above left) . Built around 1250 by the locals, it was burned down around 1265 by the locals, so it wouldn't be captured by the English and used against them. The Welsh Eistedfodd, a large choral festival is held in town every year, so it is a fairly well-known place. I walked up there on my own earlyish one morning and got a view back as far as Pontycyllte, down to the town, and up the river, even with the summer haze. I was the only one up there at that time, and it was nice to have the run of the place, sitting on a mountain over a town.