Hawksbury Junction and Sutton Stop

A December stroll around Hawksbury Junction and Sutton Stop. It started nice and sunny but soon clouded over and the wind soon created a distinct chill.
Shot in cinemascope format video at HD quality. If you can, I suggest you watch on a large screen (on a dark background) to get and see the cinematic feeling. This gives a greater sense of scale (I hope). I know many will or can only watch on phones and tablets, which of course will still work.

Hawksbury Junction is at the junction of Oxford and Coventry Canals and is situated just north of the M6 Junction 3. It is easily accessible and there is plenty of free parking.

A bit of background - The first ten miles of the Coventry canal were completed in 1769 to transport coal from the Bedworth area into Coventry.
The Oxford canal was completed in 1778. The original junction wasn't here but was in fact about a mile closer to Coventry at Longford. The sections of two canals ran parallel to each other, and, was subject to lots of wrangling between the respective canal owners.

The current junction was completed in 1803. The drop of 7 inches (18m) between the Coventry and Oxford canals is the smallest stop lock drop anywhere in the UK. This was done to stop water from the Oxford canal feeding into the Coventry canal - canal owners were very careful to make sure no other company profited from their engineering.
While the whole area is commonly known as Sutton Stop, Sutton Stop is the small section in front of the famous Greyhound pub. This is where barges used to stop to have their cargoes weighed to determine the charges for using the next canal. Barges were measured when they were built to record how much they dropped when loaded up. The amount the barge dropped in the water was measured at locations like Sutton Stop and then used to determine the weight and hence charges.
The area is now heavily used by leisure traffic and is a local place if interest for walkers and dog owners.
Head over to https://robertlongden.photo/history-o... for more details and some interesting old photos of the area.