Kegworth Shallow Flood Lock to Church Wilne

We’d had a good night in the Derby East Premier Inn and woke to another sunny morning. Today’s walk was considerably shorter than yesterday’s and today we did at least follow the route as shown on the map and described in the guidebook until right at the end, but it was again much more enjoyable than we’d expected. We drove the relatively short distance from the Premier Inn, via Draycott, to the hamlet of Church Wilne, where there is a very useful car park at SK448318, next to St Chad’s Water. We drove back to Kegworth, quite a short and quick journey, but a strange mixture of minor roads followed by the A50 and nearly going onto the M1. We parked back where we were yesterday, in the car park near Kegworth Shallow Flood Lock at SK495273. However, whereas yesterday the car park had been almost full, today we had it to ourselves.

We crossed the bridge by the flood lock and continued over the main River Soar, and so went from Nottinghamshire back into Leicestershire. We continued along the backstreets of Kegwoth, eventually turning right and heading out of the village. The guidebook says that the Midshires Way follows rather busy roads from Kegworth to Sawley, but the road we were on really wasn’t busy. We were passed by occasional cars (mostly posh SUVs) but cyclists and horseriders were more common. The countryside was flat flood plain and nothing special, but neither was there anything wrong with it. We got closer to the Ratcliffe on Soar power station, and we crossed over the A453 on a bridge over which traffic lights theoretically controlled the direction of traffic, but with mostly cyclists crossing, the lights just seemed to cycle continuously. We turned left with the road, and passed a sign which indicated that you're only allowed to drive along here for access, though occasional (mostly large) cars continued to pass us. To our left were flooded gravel pits and on our right, we reached the Kegworth Shooting Ground.

This was where most of the cars coming along the road seemed to be going and it also explained the loud bangs we had been hearing for a while. We turned right at a Midshires Way sign (the only one we saw yesterday or today) and there followed about a kilometre where we were crossing fields rather than walking along the road. Unfortunately, the loud bangs continued for the duration of the off-road section and rather spoilt it (from the Kegworth Shooting Ground's website it appears they mostly shoot "every other Sunday" so we'd been a little unlucky in our choice of walking day). We returned to the road and continued towards Sawley, passing several flooded gravel pits. We passed under a railway bridge and reached a rather boring section where we were walking around the edge of the Sawley Marina (apparently the largest inland marina in the UK) but it was all fiercely private and we only caught occasional glimpses of boats. The bells of Sawley Church, a kilometre or so to the north across various waterways, were peeling.

We passed the Plank and Leggitt Pub and turned right onto a more major road which crossed first the Trent and Mersey Canal and then the River Trent. We weren’t entirely sure which waterway we should walk alongside, and I was also puzzled about the county boundaries, so we continued to the River Trent to work out the lie of the land and read the “Welcome to X” county signs. The answer to the first uncertainty was we needed to follow the southern bank of the Canal; the second was that we were still in Leicestershire (because we were south of the Trent); to the north of the Trent was Derbyshire. This seemed a bit odd, as we were not that far from Nottingham (so why not Nottinghamshire?), but I suppose we were quite close to Derby too. It seems that yesterday's walk was our only day of walking in Nottinghamshire on the Midshires Way.

We returned to the bank of the Trent and Mersey Canal, but the rivers and canals are even more confusing than counties round here. After a short distance, our straight-ahead route brought us to the River Trent at the point at which it heads off to the north. There is a weir on the river, so the only way of navigating to the east is along the canal. We passed under the M1 and an “aqueduct” which seems a bit of a cheat – the water crossing the River Trent is in a pipe. However, soon we reached a veritable cross roads of rivers and canals. The River Trent came from the left, the Trent and Mersey Canal was straight ahead and the River Derwent joined us from the right. We used the Longhorse Bridge to cross the River Trent and continued along by the canal, which was getting quite busy both in terms of boats and walkers. We stopped at a bench for an early lunch and watched a boat coming through a lock.

Less than a mile to the west of the junction with the River Trent and the River Derwent, we reached the outskirts of the busy canal village of Shardlow. We crossed over the canal and followed the minor road through the hamlet of Great Wilne (which is in the same parish as Shardlow and really just a continuation of it; it's all very pretty). Bizarrely, Great Wilne 's church is across the River Derwent in Church Wilne, where we had parked. It's quite a long drive round; not so bad on foot but we did have to turn right off the road onto a footpath across the fields, then cross the River Derwent by way of a footbridge then rejoining a road, actually the road we had used for the first part of our drive between our end and start points. From here, the route of the Midshires Way shown on the map follows the road to the east but we headed north west then took a muddy footpath which brought us out at the pretty Church. St Chad's Water, presumably a flooded gravel pit, is also an attractive spot.