Caldwall Lock Cottage

Time and Place: NarrowBoat, Autumn 2022

Moz Copestake recalls two years spent living beside the Staffs & Worcs Canal in the 1960s

I read a piece in the NB Spring 2022 issue on Falling Sands Lock Cottage, long since gone, and it has prompted me to write to you about my home for a short time in the late 1960s – the next lock cottage up on the Staffs & Worcs: Caldwall Lock Cottage. My mother and stepfather moved there in 1966 from a tower block in Birmingham and I would spend many weekends and holidays there with them. I was in my mid-teens. It was in a serious state of disrepair and had no electric or gas or connection to sewage. We did have cold running water though, a tap in the small outhouse, so we were doing a little better than Falling Sands 20 years earlier. We had a chemical closet in the outhouse with strict instructions that it could not be emptied into the canal, only fast flowing water – which meant carrying it over the canal via our little split bridge and emptying it into the fledgling River Stour, on the other side of the towpath. Here it was little more than a rushing stream.The pro…