The Four Counties Ring

The Four Counties Ring is a 109 mile circuit through the counties of Cheshire, Staffordshire, West Midlands and Shropshire. Cheshire has been famous for it’s salt production since Roman times. Nantwich is now a thriving market town filled with good antique shops and many handsome typically Cheshire ‘black and white’ timbered buildings. Big pastures and wide skies bring you on to Middlewich, another old salt town dominated by its musket scarred parish church where Cavaliers sought refuge during the Civil War.

The Potteries come next, but first you have to burrow under Harecastle Hill for 1¾ subterranean miles through Harecastle tunnel. By the time your eyes have re-accustomed themselves to daylight the landscape has changed dramatically. Cheshire pastures have given way to Staffordshire industry. Here are the Potteries, home of Wedgwood, Spode, Minton and other renowned porcelain and pottery. The 1986 International Garden Festival was held here beside the canal on the site of an old steel works which, ironically, had grown where the formal gardens of Josiah Wedgwood's Etruria Hall once stood.

At Great Haywood, cruising beneath the slender arch of the junction roving bridge, you turn off the Trent & Mersey canal onto the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. The National Trust’s Shugborough Hall is only a walk through the woods away. The Staffordshire County Museum is here too, with an entrancing collection of domestic treasures and a Farm Park with many rare breeds.

Leaving Great Haywood you cross the Trent upon a low aqueduct then soon the canal begins to widen into a broad lagoon called Tixall Wide where, legend has it, Izaak Walton learnt his trade. The canal skirts Cannock Chase, where you can walk into woods inhabited by deer, and slips almost secretly through the suburbs of the county town of Stafford. Then you begin to climb up through locks to Gailey Wharf. Here the distinctive circular toll-keepers house has been opened as a craft shop.

The final lap is in the Shropshire Union Canal, an extraordinary landscape of rolling countryside and big farms. One typical ‘Shroppie’ cutting brings you to Tyrley Wharf with its picturesque Tudor-style cottages. At one of these you can buy mouth-watering home cooking and produce from the garden. The locks at Adderley are as beautiful as any in Britain. To prove this they regularly win the ‘Best Kept Lock’ prize from British Waterways. Bright flower beds border each chamber, and there is a rumour that the lock-keeper washes the gravelled towpath each morning before the rest of us are up!