OUR home for the next five days is nearly 60feet long and about six feet wide. You have to breath in to pass one another in the corridor. They are not called 'narrow boats' for nothing. The fittings are masterpieces of space-saving ingenuity. There is barely room to turn around in the toilet but the sink has gold taps, there's a proper flushing loo and a power shower. Likewise, the kitchen has a full-sized cooker, a fridge and sink and enough sparklingly clean pots and pans to keep Gordon Ramsay expletive free on a trip across the Atlantic. There are shelves and cupboards built into every nook and cranny and along with piping hot water there are radiators. Thanks heavens. It is early April in Staffordshire and every duck with any sense has got its head on back to front against a biting wind and buried under its personal duvet. The Caldon Canal runs for about 16 miles from Stoke on Trent to Froghall. It was built at the end of the 18th century to transport the raw materials for Stoke's potteries and ship out the finished wares. It is now reckoned by aficionados to be one of the prettiest canals in the Midlands, although it doesn't start off well. Fabled Etruria, where Josiah Wedgwood revolutionised English ceramics, has been flattened to make way for a cornflake-box collection of supermarkets and factory outlets. Josiah's house has been turned into an hotel and the centuries old potteries that once lined the canal are being torn down to make way for offices and new homes. It takes us the best part of a day at a steady chug to escape this depressing landscape of municipal vandalism. Narrow boats may have a chunky aerodynamic, but at top speed they are hard pushed to overtake a man on the towpath walking a three-legged dog. We encounter our first set of locks when we have barely had time to get our sea legs.These are the only staircase locks in Staffordshire, a cunning arrangement of multiple gates and sluices that enable boats to negotiate the county's equivalent of the Niagara Falls. From ground level to rooftop height takes a good half hour of winding sluices up and down and heaving on gates and we learn our first lesson about canal boating: He who first grabs the tiller is thereafter sitting pretty. | THERE are 2,000 miles of navigable inland waterways in Britain, the earliest dating back to Roman times. The majority were built during the industrial revolution when they were the motorways of their day, with thousands of craft carrying goods and people between towns and factories. Birmingham has so many it has been called the Venice of the North, writes Roy Westlake. Most are now exclusively used for pleasure cruising. The traditional wooden narrow boats - typically 6feet wide and up to 70feet long - have been replaced by fleets of steel-hulled holiday homes equipped with comfortable bedrooms, fitted kitchens, hot and cold running water, showers, television and central heating. The size of craft matches the locks on the particular canal on which they operate. Opening manually operated locks takes muscle-power and some canals have locks every few miles. Those on the upper Thames are electrically powered and controlled by the lock keeper, while waterways such as the Norfolk Broads are lock free. If the thought of opening and closing lock gates is too daunting you can travel by 'hotel' boat, where a crew will do all the work. These boats usually operate in pairs with a powered craft towing a 'dumb butty'.
Many of the canals have evocative names - the Grand Union and the Peak Forest - and some traverse spectacular scenery. The Llangollen branch of the Shropshire Union Canal is carried across the River Dee valley on a 120 foot high aqueduct that must rank as one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in Britain. | Not that steering is a complete push- over. The back and front of the boat seem to have no relationship with each other, so going round tight corners is a bit like pushing a 60ft column of supermarket trolleys through a crowded car park. (Days later we read the instruction book and realise we should have had a crew member sitting on the sharp end shouting 'left hand down a bit' like in the Navy Lark and generally fending off buildings and bridges with a pike staff.) At night we moor up as close as possible to a likely hostelry. The Caldon has a string of them dotted at convenient points along the canalside. Cooking is entirely feasible - everything is provided down to a cruet - but we are on holiday. Everyone we meet is disarmingly friendly. Perhaps patience wears thinner at the height of the season, but the pubs are welcoming, the food is excellent, and passersby on the towpath wish us 'ow do' without exception. Some people find the canal boating lifestyle so seductive they sell their homes and possessions to enjoy it all year round. A cheap second-hand boat will cost around £20,000. There is fuel to buy, and licences from British Waterways, and a mooring to pay for if you stop for any length of time, but apart fronUhat the living is cheap and fancy free. Halfway through our trip the weather improves, the sun breaks through the clouds and we sit in the open cockpit in the front of the boat with the sound of water rippling under the hull and birds singing in the bluebell woods. In the distance there is the haunting whoop of a steam whistle on the restored Churnet Valley Railway. It was built to compete with the canal's commercial traffic and is now itself an historic relic. I slip into a pleasing daydream about selling up and buying a canal boat to spend the rest of my days chugging gently through an idyllic countryside. Then there's a call from the tiller. 'Lock ahead!' and I remember with a sinking feeling that it's my turn with the winding handle...again. |
