Stoke Bruerne offers youngsters a unique example
of a compact modern-day village with working examples of
historic features that still have relevance in the
present day.
The Grand Union Canal runs through the heart of
the village and offers a combination of locks and a
tunnel as examples of the technology of the early
Industrial Revolution. In the very centre of this is the
Canal Museum, displaying a range of artefacts from the
two hundred-year-old story of the canal, bringing to
life the importance of the canals in shaping our modern
society, the boats and the cargoes that were carried
within living memory, and the life-style of the men,
women and children who lived on and made the canals
work.
Away from the canal the village possesses excellent
examples of an agricultural community’s life in the 19th
century, with farmhouses, labourer’s cottages, barns and
similar buildings still in use in a modern context,
including a working blacksmith’s forge.
The Church of St Mary the Virgin, which
overlooks the village and which was used as a sighting
mark for the construction of Blisworth canal tunnel
between 1793 and 1805, is a fine building dating back to
c1100 with good examples of the various styles of church
architecture and furnishings since that time.
Charlie’s cruise starts from outside the Canal Museum
and includes a short trip into Blisworth Tunnel, at 3km
long one of the longest tunnels on our canal system.
