The River Nene becomed navigable at Northampton where the Northampton branch on the Grand Union canal locks down into it, and it then meanders through Wellingborough and Oundle to Peterborough, and on to Stanground where it becomes tidal at Stanground Sluice. The locks (or rather "sluices") are characterised by having conventional upper lock gates, but a guillotine lower gate that's raised high up our of the water to lets boats enter and leave the lock as the lower level. I can recall taking a boat part way down the Nene a number of years ago; in those days, the lower gates were mostly operated by windlasses and were renowned to be very hard work. These days, they have mostly been electrified and they're much easier. I'll admit to being a little sad at the electric box on the Sluice at Orton Mere, but then I celebrate technological progress in my work - I was in Peterborough to run a training course on the Python programming language ... and with Python, the technical steps forward from older langauges such as Fortran and Cobol allow the developer to write in a day code that would have taken a week to write previously. With good planning, Python code is easy to maintain.

Show a large image

More about python programming courses

Associated topic - On site - venues, UK and Ireland

Next ... random image ... a slide show ... image from list below