Moored up at the pleasant Cheshire market town of Congleton, awaiting my good buddy, Mark, who joins me for a week, the route is definitely southward bound for a few weeks now. And with Mark's help we should motor well along the Trent and Mersey towards Fazeley Junction at Tamworth.

But first there is a small detour up the Caldon Canal that's virtually compulsory if my life is worth living. This nine-lock 13-mile trip should take seven hours or less up to Leek, where an old colleague and friend has lived for the past 18 years, then back the next day to join the mainline, the Grand Trunk Canal, as the T&M came to be known in the first 70 years of its life before being taken over by the North Staffordshire Railway in 1845.

Realising the advantage of stability that canals offered, Josiah Wedgwood was a prime mover in the development of Trent and Mersey, which enabled his company to send safely its pottery and porcelain from its headquarters in Stoke on Trent north to Liverpool Docks and to Manchester and over the Pennines, east to Nottingham and Leicester, and south to Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford and London.

Before it was built, Wedgwood reckon he'd be satisfied if just a third of his goods transported by packhorse or wagon arrived at their destination intact. The canal was immediately successful and carried huge tonnages, surviving even the coming of the railways for the carriage of china.

Being one of the earlier canals, it largely follows the contours of the land and has a succession of locks widely spaced out, rather than grouped in close-set flights. From Stoke it locks down steadily to Great Hayward Junction, where the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal branches off to the west, skirting the north of Wolverhampton and west of Dudley to Stourbridge, when I will pick it up next week on course for the River Severn.

But first a long, relatively lock-free cruise brings the canal to Fradley Junction where the T & M turns north east for Burton and Nottingham, while I continue south-westerly on the Coventry Canal over an 11-mile pound to Fazeley Junction for a bit of R & R ready for the long haul next week up into heights of Birmingham - the Rome, the Mecca, the Venice even, of the English Canal network.