Hi, Your comments are always most welcome
No picnic indeed! I was laughing out loud till I remembered it's local tax payers' money that's wasted 
Martin,
But there must have been plans for the locals to see?
If I was a local I would have protested at the idea that bits of rock were ideal for picnic tables.
They could have built a bbq area at least where families could have come.. they needed more trees, and for sure they need a mower right now to take the scrub down again.
It is also very boggy.. I know it has been raining but I can't imagine what the quagmire would be like in the winter.. It's a shame, it could have been a nice place..
Sue
Sue
Oh the locals objected alright.
Fat lot of use that did.
Those lock gates that are ending their life on an overgrown pile of mud as kiddies climbing frame and a motocross leap for the local bikers, are the historic, and now unique, cast iron gates taken from Hillmorton Middle Lock after over 160 years service to be replaced with modern gates with 20 year life!
Hillmorton Canal Heritage Society paid to get planning permission to display them on the end of Badseys Bistro as a backdrop for Heritage Theatre, using a grant already offered. But then the same planning people decided it was much better to spend money taken from Rugby tax payers and from your BW licenses, to create what you saw. THe chat over Badsey's Bar is the total cost of this work was £130,000 which included restoring the towing path, but after the contractor subcontracted to a firm who subcontracted to another firm, the surface that was apparently supposed to set like rock, but ended up like windblown sandunes is due to be relaid - if anyone can be found to take the responsibility of course.
Still, comments from your blog have been published in the local paper this week so you got the conversation going again but then after all -
what else should BW have done with the items cluttering up their Hillmorton Maintenance Base, that has been there since BW was formed, when the maintenance staff had to clear out the yard this year for its closure? Must have been rather like digging their own graves!
Keep on blogging....
Ian 
Well Ian, I am glad, to be honest, that the local people in the area have not been happy with what they have been given. I did wonder if Hillmorton turned their back on their wonderful ammenity.
I am cross now, that those lock gates are such an importent part of our canal heritage, and by 'our' I mean all of us, whether we be canal users or not. This is too much of a throw away world, and this is just the kind of thing that tends to be lost to be burnt or scrapped.. "Can't be botheredness" springs to mind.
It would have been so very much better for the Hillmorton Canal Heritage Society to have allocated those ancient gates to a purpose for the future of history.. but maybe it was easier for the gates to be dumped on a muddy hill?
The costings are laughable to say the least Ian.
I thank you for your comment, very much appreciated it was.
Sue
