The ex-inn looks out like a castle over the Trent and Mersey canal and the backwater of the Trent. The door is old oak, the air is cold, and the alien canallers trudge up to the inn from their bollarded barges, to roll down again after a time to fall into their higgledy-piggledy beds for the morning. The bridge is red iron and the canal is silted. Twelve swans snort as I move to the backwater, and a hidden chalet retreats shyly into the lower cliff on the water’s edge. Along the waterway bank there is a straggling lowbuilt bungalow, wysteria over the gate. All is deserted, even the wood opposite. A moored barge, the Elder, has been depositing red mud onto the towpath where the canal seeps through to the river. A water vole eats reeds with a loud chewing – seeing me, it plunges under the barge. I come to another bridge, turn back, and the misty dusk creeps slowly in. Starlings fly towards Derby in flocks, the water birds flop into the backwater, and the lights of the large house flick on, yellow across the sloping field.