Being by the water is a treat for all of your senses, however, we think smell has an important role to play by the canal as it's the one most associated with memory. Why don't you visit us and recall happy childhood memories or create new memories that you'll be able to recollect long into the future?
Ecologist Laura Mullholland has put together her favourite smells of autumn.
Mulchy mustiness
Pop down to the canal during the autumn and there's a fabulous musty aroma in the air. This is the smell of leaves turning brown and dropping to the floor, where tiny insects are ready and waiting to munch through the decaying matter.
Centipedes, millipedes and beetles are one of the most important parts of our ecosystem. It's their job to tidy up the mess that autumn brings and we work hard to protect them so that they can do their job.
Fungi
Toadstools and brackets, mushrooms and puffballs all use their underground branching networks of mycelium, a threadlike mass, to help breakdown matter in the soil which makes it more fertile for the vegetation above to thrive.
Most of the fungus is actually underground and the parts we see above ground are the fruiting bodies, like apples on a tree. Some of these fungi have quite pungent aromas, probably the best known of these is the stinkhorn, which has an unpleasant scent but not as bad as the latticed stinkhorn, an alien to the UK but turning up at more sites each year, which smells like rotting flesh.