Introduction
My mum and I are walking parts of the Grand Union Canal. On 24 May 2008, we walked a section from Denham station to Watford Junction station. Dad joined us too.
I arrived (late; at two points I ran for a train and saw it pull away) and had to make my way back through Denham village without a map; we were going to meet at the country park visitor's centre. I managed to remember the route from a month ago and met my parents, who by now were all caked up and ready to go.
The canal
From there it didn't take long to get to the canal, and for this walk we stayed by the canal almost the whole way.
At one point there was a rather strange marina opposite. It gave the impression that the canal had just randomly flooded a large adjoining area; there wasn't an entrance exactly, more a series of places where the water ran over the boundary.
An old metal pedestrian bridge ran across the canal at one point, but I guess it led to private property; it had been thoroughly blocked by a rough assortment of metal grids, in addition to a tangle of undergrowth. We did climb up onto it anyway, just to see.
Waterways led off the canal at various points, none of them passable to boats.
We reached Copper Mill Lock, so called because there's an old copper mill opposite. They used to take in copper on the canal and, er, mill it into copper sheets or whatever. It's a very long brick building that has, of course, now been converted into housing or offices. Before the lock, the millstream from an older mill flows fast into the canal; a horde of canoeists were going around a slalom course here.
An bridge ran across an inlet on our side of the canal, in addition to the bridge that carried the towpath. Spiderwebs on this structure were very prominent, covered in some kind of fluff.
We then came upon the most surprising sight: the steel-frame skeleton of a large building opposite, with a giant stuffed-toy monkey hanging from one of its upper beams. I don't know what the monkey did to deserve that! I tried Google but wasn't sure what to search on. (It's here - you can just see it over the water.)
There were lots of moorings along the canal for most of the rest of the way. Actually, we'd seen a fair few boats moving, too; the final count of that was somewhere above 20. Probably not as many as we'd have seen when it was a working canal, although at that point we wouldn't have been officially allowed on the towpath as it was closed to the public, and I wouldn't have been able to take pictures because photography hadn't been invented (ok not quite but). You win some, you lose some.
The rest of the way into Watford featured several depressing housing estates beside the canal, presumably built on old industrial land.
And that's it: we walked into Watford through a nice, large park with a funfair (which we didn't visit) and to the station.