Day 24 - Tuesday April 28th. This was a day we had been rather dreading as we had to get through the towns of Runcorn and Widnes in order to cross the Mersey, and in addition, the countryside would be flat and less interesting. The weather was suitably drizzly as we walked down the hill on winding streets towards the A56. It was the rush hour, and there were traffic jams along the road, children going to school and people rushing to work all around us. The A road was the only route across the River Weaver and the Weaver Navigation which is, or was, a ship canal. The couple of miles into the edges of Runcorn were quite interesting with the bridges over the water and the marshy countryside leading up to them.
We soon joined a cycle route and from that point for a couple of miles hardly saw a house! The route was tree lined and separated from the suburbs around us, which made for pleasant easy walking. We did have to walk up the side of a large road and through some housing estates over the last bit, but it was a great deal better than we'd expected. Runcorn is mostly a new town, but there is an old bit by the River Mersey, however we only saw it from above as we climbed up onto the bridge that crosses the Manchester Ship Canal and the river. The Mersey is very wide, flat and sandy, and with the tide out, the actual river looked quite small compared to the size of the channel.
On the north side, we went down into the area called 'West Bank', made up of older house in the Coronation Street style, then followed the streets through the east side of Widnes into Halton, one of the suburbs. There were a lot of business and industrial buidings, but most seemed to be empty and there were plenty of To Let signs. Quite depressing. We had coffee and a tea cake in a cafe on the main street of Halton, then continued through the suburban streets and out into the flat countryside. This part of the day was dominated by the huge power station which sits with it's 8 cooling towers to the east of Widnes, so each time you looked up, it loomed large until the mid afternoon.
We trudged along roads, lanes and the occasional footpath across mainly agricultural land and the occasional small settlement or industrial area. We passed through part of the Merseyside Forest, which is new forest planted over the past decade in order to replace forest chopped down in previous years. It was good to see large numbers of young trees growing, which will be very lovely in years to come. We took one small diversion through a marshy nature trail area that looked rather dry and had to circle a field to get back to the path. Then we passed an extraordinary property just south of Haydock where the first thing we saw was a rusty field gun pointing out across the fields. There was a lot of scrap metal, vehicles, wood and rubbish and a smallish stone-built house in a compound surrounded by a high fence, with barking alsations inside and two women incongruously sitting in the garden. What an odd place!
The lane took us into new housing developments, and then into the streets of Haydock where we found a Travelodge to stay in at 4pm - we had done our 20 miles, but finished early for a change - a benefit of walking on flat country with no stiles!