Miles Away Again

Stourbridge glass

2024-02-13T10:37:00.001+00:00

You don’t think of Birmingham as being on a hill but approaching this inland city by boat, that fact becomes apparent. My day’s planned ascent of a flight of 16 locks leading out of Stourbridge (to then reach another flight of ten) did not go well. “There’s a log!” shouted a helpful onlooker, peering down into the deep, dark chamber. It was relatively welcome news. I had feared worse - a shopping trolley or dead body - but a bit of wood wedged between steel hull and brick wall explained why my boat wouldn’t move forward into the tight-fitting chamber. My 3mph life suddenly ground to a halt. It was not a good start. Eventually, after plenty of revs in reverse, the boat eased backwards enough to free the log. Then I had to lie across the bow to haul out the hefty cut branch, all while a growing number of onlookers enjoyed the entertainment from above. No boats had been through these locks for a while it seemed. The water was thick with duckweed, plastic bottles, cans, crisp wrappers and garden debris. Above the water line, the walls of the empty chamber were dry, the mosses and lichens growing on the 200-year old bricks had not enjoyed an immersion for days, perhaps weeks. Once I’d removed the log, I climbed up a ladder fixed to the wall, closed the heavy gates behind me, opened the paddles gently to let water fill the chamber and watched as the boat rose up to meet me.

The second and third locks were thankfully hassle-free. Passers-by waved and smiled. One or two said how it was nice to see a boat on the move. Then just as I entered the chamber of the fourth lock, all hell let loose. Red light! Squealing alarm! Billows of steam! This had never happened before. The engine was overheating. I turned it off and, never having got to grips with engine maintenance even after all these years, I called River Canal Rescue. An engineer was with me within 90 minutes. A leaking hose was trimmed and refitted, the coolant tank refilled with anti-freeze and water and I was good to go. I cruised on a few yards and, having been much delayed, decided I’d moor for the night outside the historic Red House glass cone. This conical structure is made of bricks, not glass, and shaped a little like the bottle kilns of Stoke on Trent. Built beside the canal, this was the centre of glass manufacture for over 150 years thanks to the geology of the area being rich in the three raw ingredients needed, namely sand, clay and coal. Transporting the finished product - most famously Stuart crystal - gently along the canal by boat was a safer bet than packing it onto a horse and cart to be carried over rutted unsurfaced roads. The glass cone - where sand was melted in a furnace and glass blown - is currently under restoration but a small museum and visitor centre are open daily. I learnt how England’s reputation for delicate glassware came about as a result of it being taxed by weight. I also watched in awe as in an adjacent workshop, glassblowers, Elliot Walker and Bethany Wood worked to create a vase, a commission for a customer who would be paying several thousand pounds for the piece. Walker lamented the closure of glass art courses in institutions nearby saying how, although mass production has died out, there is a high demand for bespoke artisan pieces.

A new exhibition has just opened in London with one of Walker’s pieces on display, a glass chair coloured yellow with uranium. Indeed, before I’d even stumbled across Walker and Wood, I’d heard about this ‘uranium chair’ on a BBC Radio 4 programme all about glass that, with great coincidence, I listened to that morning as I was moored right outside their workshop.

After, watching, mesmerised as Walker and Wood manipulated, cut and blew molten glass, I cruised off to ascend the remaining 12 locks of the Stourbridge flight and then, as dusk was closing in, the ten locks of the Delph flight before mooring for the night above the sprawling car-centric shopping centre of Merry Hill, built on the site of a former steel works.

The picture is of my mooring spot on the outskirts of Stourbridge before setting off up the locks.

I haven’t updated this blog for a long time but decided it might be time to start again especially as The Guardian is soon running an excerpt from the first chapter of my (as yet otherwise unpublished) book about my travels from the northernmost limit of navigation to the southernmost.

A cruise through the potteries...another excerpt from my travelogue/memoir

2021-07-09T15:56:00.000+01:00

...Further on, next to the canal, decaying Victorian brick buildings sprout rosebay willow herb and valerian. A structure the shape of a squat bottle is furry with grass growing through the brickwork. Later a grouping of Victorian industrial buildings appears that is all neat and tidy, not crumbling and sprouting vegetation but recently restored, with flower planters and picnic tables on neatly mown grass by the canal. There are new mooring rings and a sign welcoming narrowboats. Middleport Pottery in Burslem - one of the six towns that make up the polycentric city of Stoke-on-Trent - has been in continuous operation since 1888. It makes claims to be a ‘model’ pottery, the first pottery where the buildings and work areas all neatly flowed one to the other, designed by an architect who knew his pottery manufacturing. This ‘pot works’ - as pottery factories are known in the area -may well have been the inspiration for 19th century author Arnold Bennett’s Providence Works in his book Anna of the five towns. He describes how ‘clay travelled naturally in a circle from the slip-house by the canal to the packing house by the canal, there was no carrying to and fro.’

Today, the pottery made in the Victorian red brick factory is packed into lorries rather than narrowboats but Middleport Pottery is the only pottery in Stoke-on-Trent still using the tissue transfer method to apply designs to its Burleigh ware range. This involves printing on to delicate tissue paper - manufactured by a French cigarette company - and transferring the pattern from tissue paper to ceramics by hand. The labour-intensive process means high prices. Burleigh ware is sold in Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. Members of Soho House, the private members’ club beloved of actors and media darlings, drink from teacups costing £20 each.

In the small museum there are ledgers, old photographs and samples of ware from the pottery’s history. Suddenly, a bakelite phone rings on a desk. As no members of staff appear to be around, I pick up the receiver, “Hello” I say but before I can say more, a recorded voice instructs me to listen to a selection of recordings of former workers and so I listen to Stan Johnson who, in 1936, at the age of 14, started work for “eleven bob a week.” He would carry up to 36 tea-pots at a time, balanced on a board on his head. To make it more comfortable, he would rest the board on an old silk stocking given to him by his mother (“they didn’t have nylons in those days”), that he coiled up under his cap. He doesn’t mention if it was his Mum who suggested the idea to stop his head from hurting. Knowing mothers, I imagine so. Stan goes on to talk about the smells in the pottery. “Strewth! I couldn’t get my breath for the smell of aniseed.” Aniseed was mixed with gold to make a liquid with which gilders painted the rims of plates. Other ornamenters used turpentine, others size. You could tell what jobs people did in the town of Burslem by the smell that lingered in their hair and on their clothes.

Men would have smelt of coal fires. They carried dozens of items of pottery at a time, all placed into clay containers called saggars that protected the pottery from coal smoke while they were being fired in the kiln. Up to 2,000 saggars were stacked high - and very carefully - into the bottle-shaped brick kilns. The saggars only lasted a few firings each and so a constant supply of new ones was needed. Saggars were made on site and their production process resulted in what must be one of the strangest job titles ever in British industry: the saggar maker’s bottom knocker. A saggar maker’s bottom knocker was a man who batted - or knocked - marl, or clay, flat to make the bottoms of the saggars for the saggar-maker. The bottom knocker used a heavy oak mallet, called a mawl, soaked in water, to bash the marl until it was of the right thickness and consistency. Judging by a 1964 photograph of Fred Boulton, one of the last saggar maker’s bottom knockers, the job developed the muscles of the mawl-holding arm. Saggar maker’s bottom knockers hoped to become saggar makers one day. They were kept in place by their next-in-line. “If you didn’t have a bottom ready for the saggar maker, you got a right cussing,” says a bottom knocker in a piece of film footage.

Middleport pottery had seven of the distinctive bottle-shaped brick kilns at the pottery but, after the Clean Air Act of 1968, they were replaced by gas kilns. The smoking ‘bottle ovens’ became redundant and all but one were demolished. Saggars were no longer needed either, so saggar makers and their bottom knockers lost their jobs.

Although there were once as many as 2,000 bottle ovens in the Potteries, less than fifty remain. The thousands of bottle-shaped chimneys would have filled the air with a pall of black smoke as fires raged in their furnaces for days at a time.

There was a certain romanticism about the smokiness. Rolt reports how there were postcards of smoky townscapes on sale ‘for the rare visitor.’ While in a biography of Arnold Bennett, who was as famous as Dickens in his day, the writer E.J.D Warrilow describes the pollution as beautiful.

As the twilight deepened into dusk hundreds of gas lamps shed their yellow light as each in turn was touched, as if by a glow-worm, by the lamp-lighter’s torches. At night, lamp light and smoke played their games of hide-and-seek until the whole valley became a low sky of twinkling stars, beneath which, as the hours past, shawl and apron clad pottery workers hurried homewards through smoke laden streets. Six towns – full of industrial beauty and yet so commonplace.

Warrilow doesn’t mention that pottery workers suffered silicosis, also known as potter’s rot, from the alumina and flint dust that they liberally sprinkled among the pottery in the saggars to reduce shrinkage during firing.

I exited through the gift shop but couldn’t afford to buy anything.

Mum’s taste in pottery didn’t run to showy or expensive. No Burleigh ware graced our dining table or mantlepiece, not that we could afford it anyway. No, Mum’s pottery of choice during my childhood was Midwinter, also made in Burslem as it happens. Founded by William Midwinter in 1910, the pottery employed over 700 people in the 1930s but by the 1980s was no longer in production. In the 1970s, Mum bought a dinner set of blue flowers on an off-white background, speckled with brown, with brown painted rims. It was sturdy, rustic pottery. When First Mate first visited my parents, he was ecstatic. “Ah, Midwinter!” he said wistfully. “I’ve been looking for a Midwinter bowl for years since I broke one of mine. They’m very collectable now,” he said, in his Black Country dialect. “Well, I’ll check your bags before you go!” said Mum and they both laughed.

Having seen Mum’s forty year old dinner service, chipped and cracked though it was, First Mate became obsessed. He was on a mission to find himself a fourth bowl. Whenever he came to visit me on the boat, we would rummage through local charity shops on the off chance of finding a replacement for his missing Midwinter pottery.

The charity shop searches were fruitless until one day, a couple of months after Mum had died, we walked in to a Sue Ryder shop in Northwich to find not just his one missing bowl but a 24-piece dinner service of Midwinter, Stonehenge. We looked at each other and clasped hands to our mouths. We bought the lot and shared it between us. The plates and bowls have the same oatmeal background, speckled with brown and the same rustic earthen rims as Mum’s Midwinter set but instead of blue flowers, there are graceful stems of wild oats and grass flowers. It reminds me of my childhood, not only the meals Mum cooked and served at the yellow formica kitchen table in our Wiltshire cottage but the fields and country lanes where we walked with our springer spaniel. Mum would have laughed to hear how we’d found not just one bowl but a whole dinner service, all for £15. Unless we are completely reckless, it should outlive us both.

I cruised on past Etruria, Wedgwood’s land that he bought canal-side in 1767 and where he built a grand factory and his home, after he quickly outgrew his first small pot works. The name he chose, Etruria, is the ancient state that is now part of Tuscany. Etruscans were famed for, among other things, painting of vases. All that remains of Wedgwood’s Etruria works is one round building, thought to have been a store-room, that is now unceremoniously in the corner of a car park, eight feet below the level of the canal, having sunk due to mining subsidence. Eight feet down: the depth of a two-person grave.

I locked my way down locks - for this is the ‘summit’ of the Trent & Mersey canal, past a pleasant cemetery and modern canal-side apartments. At the fifth and last lock of the Stoke flight, a large tattooed woman was outside her canal-side house drinking a beer from a bottle but she wasn’t facing the canal. She leant over a fence, watching the traffic going round a round-about. She seemed more interested in that.

There were ring roads and corrugated warehouses. One, Jones & Shufflebottom, bathroom specialist. Did having the name Shufflebottom predestine him/her to become a purveyor of baths? There is some evidence that surnames do that to you. ‘Nominative determinism’ it is called. Take the presenters of Radio 4’s Gardener’s Question Time: Bob Flowerdew, Pippa Greenwood. My surname is Miles and I was a travel writer who used to jet off to the other side of the world every month. Now I travel at three miles an hour.

There was a waste incinerator, a bridge under a road so wide that it was like going through a tunnel, and all along, the canal had a concrete edge so that it was difficult to moor, not that you would want to. This was 'the edgelands' that ugly nexus between countryside and city, neither one thing nor the other. Some writers and artists find inspiration here. Not me. Although some grafitti made me smile. ’Up your oatcakes SUFC’ was daubed on concrete. Staffordshire is famed for its oatcakes. They’re nothing like Scottish ones, which are hard biscuits. Staffordshire oatcakes are more like a soft pancake. I imagine ‘Up your oatcakes SUFC’ is meant to be an insult to Stoke United Football Club? Or maybe an encouragement?

On the outskirts of Barlaston, across a field from the canal, is the ‘new’ Wedgwood factory, built in the 1930s. In 2015 it had a makeover, with new cafe, restaurant and reception. Coach loads of Japanese tourists visit, along with ladies who lunch and, being just a short walk from the canal, passing boaters on holiday. There is an impressive museum with thousands of pieces of pottery from the 18th century onwards, including a pot thrown by Josiah Wedgwood himself to mark the opening of the Etruria works. Wedgwood was constantly perfecting techniques and glazes with intricate experimentation and meticulous record keeping. His business grew exponentially and he could barely keep up with demand but he would always find a way to meet new orders. “He was a real workaholic,” a curator at the museum told me when I commented on his prodigious output.

On a tour of the Wedgwood factory, I watched today’s craftspeople at work, using tools with names such as diddling stick and waggler. One woman was painting passion flowers on cups and saucers for a tea-set destined for the Middle East. Each cup and saucer would cost £1,500. A man was carefully ‘sprigging’ - placing white bas relief cameo figures on a jasperware Portland vase, the ‘signature piece’ of the Wedgwood pottery that will set you back £5,000. The vase, which has been in production since Josiah Wedgwood made the first one in 1789, was initially copied from a glass vase with opaque white ornamentation made nearly 2,000 years ago in Italy. The detailing of the musculature and the draped clothing of the figures is astounding but the wonderful translucent dark cobalt blue glass of the original vase is far more beguiling than Wedgwood’s opaque, matt jasper-ware copies. The original ‘Portland vase’ is an exquisite piece that has been much written about since the 17th century. Josiah Wedgwood scored a marketing coup by borrowing this ancient Roman glass vase to make his copy. According to the British Museum where the original has been on display since 1810, it was found in Rome, probably in the mausoleum of a 3rd century Roman emperor, Alexander Severus and his mother, Julia Mammaea. Mother and son buried together. Thirty five years after first going on display in the museum, a man with mental health problems threw a heavy rock at the display cabinet and the vase was broken into smithereens. It has since been glued back together.

Some women of the waterways

2018-02-06T10:28:00.000+00:00

During WWII, the Ministry of War Transport ran a recruitment campaign with advertisements in newspapers calling for women volunteers to be trained as canal boatwomen, freeing up men to join the forces. Susan Woolfitt was one of the respondents who signed up for the Women’s Training Scheme. She joined all-women crews taking cargo from London to Birmingham and bringing coal back from Coventry. She wrote about her adventures in her book that she titled Idle Women, the disparaging nickname given to these women who wore their IW (Inland Waterways) badges. I imagine Susan as a middle class woman like Celia Johnson’s character from Brief Encounter, complete with a clipped RP accent. She was a woman of her time. She writes how they ‘worked like blacks’ and couldn’t care a tinker’s cuss. She learns to say dinner instead of lunch, comments on how the working boat people refer to their mothers as ‘mum’ and thinks most things can be resolved with a nice cup of tea. She revels in leaving her middle class home (and her children at boarding school) to live in an 8ft by 7ft cabin so cramped she has to sleep with her head in a cupboard. There is no toilet or running water. She goes for days without washing. She wears Navy bell bottom trousers, a sailor’s thick blue guernsey, oil skins and a sou’wester. As a trainee she joins two other women to work two 70ft long boats along the canals, one an unpowered ‘butty’. She works so hard pulling the butty through locks with muddy wet ropes that her constantly wet and cold hands become cracked and bleeding. Despite all this, she loves the hard work and the fresh air, the camaraderie with the other women and the sense of achievement. She loves that days are so full of activity - of lock-wheeling and balancing on the top planks - that she sleeps soundly each night. The comforts of a hot bath and a big bed - occasionally available mid-way through a trip thanks to a visit to friends - seem the utmost indulgences. The women drink pints in canalside pubs and cook on top of their stove. After a few trips up and down the canal, Woolfitt buys a primus to make cooking easier.

In London one evening, the boat cabin’s lights suddenly go dark and the contents of the cabin come hurtling around her ears. Their boat is tilting and one of the crew - her senior, Kit - has a bloody face. “On the opposite side of the water an enormous building was wrapped in flames from top to bottom. I could see the windows hanging like twisted wire from their frames.” A few minutes before it had been a factory “humming with life and work.” They remember that a new recruit, a young, anxious, woman they call ‘the child’ is on her own, having a flannel bath in the adjacent boat. Woolfitt runs to check that she is alright. She finds the child, “tastefully arrayed in her negligee…looking utterly bewildered in the middle of the debris.” “‘What’s happened? Has the Primus blown up?’” she asks.

The German “rocket” had severely damaged their boats “as though a giant had torn them to bits in a rage.” Woolfitt had narrowly escaped death. A piece of shrapnel had passed clean through the cabin where her head would have been had she not vacated the cabin to let the ‘child’ have her flannel bath in private. All is made good with a nice pot of tea, the water heated on the primus which has survived the blast. Among debris of broken china, glass, books, dust and water, the doors of the cabin blown off, her bloody-nosed crew-mate Kit’s hair “standing on end all over her head like a golliwog…solid with glass and plaster,” she cups a steaming mug in her hands and they laugh hysterically. I imagine their conversation. Has the primus blown up?! Has the primus blown up?! There’s a factory destroyed and aflame and the child wonders if the primus has blown up?! “I have never enjoyed a cup of tea as I did that one,” she writes.

By the end of the war and the end of her book, Woolfitt and one other woman are working a boat and butty along a return journey of some 350 miles of canal and 348 locks in 22 days. An incredible speed. Yet, when the war ends and the men return to their work on the boats, her time is up. Reluctantly, she leaves her strenuous boat work to once again become ‘a lady of leisure’ as she jokes with the women in the canteen at the boat depot. In her years as an ‘Idle Woman’, she has put on two stone and has biceps so big she is embarrassed by them. She can obviously match the men at the work but once the war has ended, there is no place for women on boats, except as wives of the boatmen.

Rolt's second wife, Sonia, had, like Susan Woolfitt, volunteered as an Idle Woman during the war and grew to love the life so much that she married a working boatman, George Smith, 'the Adonis of the waterways.' Tom Rolt’s and Sonia Smith’s paths crossed at a screening of a film about narrowboats. Rolt’s marriage to Angela was by now on the rocks and she later ran off to join the circus. After they had both divorced their first spouses, Sonia Smith and Tom Rolt were married in 195?. Sonia became vice-president of the Inland Waterways Association and was awarded an OBE for her ceaseless work on many aspects of heritage conservation. She died in 2014.

River Weaver

2016-04-13T11:25:00.000+01:00

On the banks of the River Weaver, below the trees, wood anemones, violets and celandines are in flower, pointillist dots of white, blue and yellow. On one of the small ponds adjacent to the navigation, a swan is on its nest among dried bull rushes and arrows of new iris leaves. A pair of great crested grebes entertains me. With ruffs and crests like medieval ladies, they shake their heads at each other, as if about to flourish castanets. Sometimes the male - I presume - makes grunts and noises like someone trying unsuccessfully to play the comb-and-paper. Then he jumps out of the water onto the female who’s lying on a piece of wood, a hummock of greyness. Two seconds later he slides off over her head, back into the water. She gets up with an ungainly waddle on her outsize flippered feet, slides into the water and they both swim off to go fishing.

Cowslips bloom nearby. The trees are mostly bare but buds are bursting on sycamore and horse chestnut and catkins of all colours - red, yellow, green - festoon alders and willows. How different all this may have looked a hundred years ago or more. Then, the area was thick with smoke from dozens of salt works. Salt mines and salt pans were all around. In the 1800s, nearly a million tons of salt a year was being carried down the Weaver, on to the Mersey and out to sea and the world.

Brine was evaporated in steel pans the size of tennis courts, heated from below with fires of burning coal. In one small area near Winsford - the limit of navigation upriver - there were over 40 salt pans operating, each with a chimney of black coal smoke. The salt was brought up from 150m below ground. There is still one active salt mine near Winsford, adjacent to the navigation. It’s the oldest and largest salt mine in Britain. Deep below ground are roads big enough for HGVs and massive machines that continuously gnaw at the rock as they trundle along. A million tons of rock salt for road gritting is brought to the surface each year. You can watch dumper trucks piling it up in mountains above the waterway. Winsford was once a bustling wharf where men loaded ships with sacks of salt. Today the rock salt is carted away by road while containers of hazardous waste arrive, to be buried into the vast empty chambers below ground that are the result of over a hundred years of salt excavation.

I’d rather be above ground, with the spring flowers and the little lakes formed by subsidence of salt mines, where swans and grebes swim and where, for the first time this year, I see a swallow swoop.

I’ve come down the Anderton boat lift from the Trent & Mersey canal to get on to this river. It’s the oldest boat lift in the world and was an exciting ride. I’ll write more about that after my trip back up onto the canal again.

The first ducklings of spring

2016-04-02T11:07:00.000+01:00

On the last day of March I see my first brood of ducklings this year. Eleven little balls of dark brown fluff cheeping frantically as they skate on the water to try and keep up with mum. At least there used to be 11. An hour or so later, I look out of my kitchen window and see one floating past, lying on its back, its little yellow tummy and feet above the water, its head under the surface. Although my initial reaction is sorrow, a strangely disturbing part of me finds it almost comical to see it lying in the water like that, right outside my boat - a dead duck.

On the towpath beside my boat I find another duckling lying on its back, upturned like a turtle, still alive. I pick it up and carry it in the palm of my hand towards the rest of the brood who are following after mum as she waddles down the towpath, trying to keep out of the way of two brutish drakes with whom feathers have been flying. The little one in my hand is in shock, almost lifeless. It doesn’t make a noise and can barely move. Its little stubs of wings are dark and wet. I place it on some grass near its siblings but it doesn’t walk towards them, it just stays there, its head tilting at an angle towards the ground, propped on its beak. Another duckling meanwhile is cheeping manically as it paddles - or almost scurries on top of the water - back and forth along the water’s edge unable to jump high enough to reach the top of the two inch stone bank of the canal. Passers by, who were taking pictures of the hatchlings, watch as I bend down to scoop out the little panicking fluff ball so it can scamper across to join its family.

Yesterday, when I cruised away, there was no sign of the mum or ducklings, apart from the one that I’d found floundering upside down. It hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d placed it and was now dead.

In the morning’s cruise, the weather was cold but dry. Despite the winter temperatures, signs of spring and reminders of life’s frailty were all around. Two fat wood pigeons sat on a hawthorn hedge pecking at its young leaves. A grey squirrel looked as if it had got itself stuck on the highest, most delicate of twigs right at the very top of a tree, where it swayed precariously as it nibbled young buds. Blackbirds, blue tits and robins sang loudly from hedges and treetops.

Birch trees are signposts pointing heavenwards. Scars of fallen branches are dark upwards-pointing arrows on the pale, silvery trunk. Limbs are lost but the tree still looks up, towards the canopy, the sky, the sun.

The sight of goat willow - pussy willow - in full bloom, its sunshine powder puffs like bunnies’ tails with yellow halos - or like tiny tummies of vulnerable ducklings - makes me well up. My Mum loved pussy-willow blossom and the buds of horse-chestnut trees, which are now bursting forth: miniature bright green palms sprouting from a sheath of sticky brown. When I was a boy, I would cycle up a steep farm lane in rural Wiltshire and cut branches of ‘sticky buds’ for Mum. She would always thank me enthusiastically, as if they were the best present I could give her. She would place them in a jug of water on a round table in the living room and, over the following days, we would watch them open and marvel at their bright new greenness, the heralding of a new season, of new life. Two years ago, I cut Mum some sticky buds when I was moored on the Worcester & Birmingham canal. I carried them on the train (another passenger remarked ‘oh, sticky buds!’ which surprised me for I had always thought that was our family name for them) all the way to Eastbourne and gave them to Mum. They were once again much appreciated and placed in a jug on a smaller round table, in a different house to my childhood home. I would give anything to be able to cut some of the budding branches for her this year too. Instead, I placed a sceptre of red berries in the clay clods on Mum’s freshly filled grave before I left Eastbourne early last month. I’d picked the branch from a tree on the South Downs, on a walk to Willingdon cemetery from the house that I still call ‘Mum and Dad’s’. I don’t know what the tree is but in late February it was heaving with scarlet fruit on its southeastern side, the side of warmth and the rising sun.

Mum was full of warmth and love and as beautiful as the springtime. I so wanted her to live to see her garden coming in to bloom once more and for me to see her smile at ducklings in the park. She would have enjoyed to hear how I’d rescued a little baby mallard from the canal and been saddened by the news that another didn’t survive.

Life turns us upside down at times or facing barriers we can’t scale. Thank goodness for those who are there to help.

Lancashire's last surviving headgear

2016-03-18T18:40:00.000+00:00

“It were hot. Very hot. This shaft here, it goes down nearly 3,000 ft then we’d go for over a mile underground, following a slope 1 in 5, until we were nearly 4,000ft below ground. It were very hot. They used to send down tanks of water. Forget pop, beer, wine…when you’re that hot the only thing that can cool you down is water,” so says Cliff, a man in his 70s, who worked in the mines of Astley Colliery from the 1960s until it closed in 1970. He now volunteers at the former coal mine that is now a ramshackle - and free - museum. The largest steam-powered winding engine in Europe is still there in its engine house, never having been dismantled and still in working order a hundred years after it was installed (but now powered by compressed air rather than steam.) I didn’t get to see it work - that only happens occasionally, during school holidays - but it must be a sight. The machine is enormous. Imagine two huge steam trains bolted to the floor with oversize wheels and pistons and a thing - there must be a word for it, like a bobbin if you had shrunk to the size of a flea - around which the steel cable wound and unwound as it raised and lowered cages from the 30m high ‘headgear’ outside, up and down the 800m-deep shaft. The cages weren’t the ones that contained the miners, these cages contained the precious black gold that was brought out a rate of eight tonnes every two minutes. It was off-loaded onto barges in the canal using steam cranes.

Coal mining gave birth to this waterway, the Bridgewater Canal, the first of the ‘modern’ canals in Britain. Back in the 1750s, the local lord of the manor, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater decided that all the disparate small-scale, shallow coal mining on his estate could be more efficient if there were better transportation to take the coal to Manchester. The Duke, still in his 20s, had just returned from a tour of the continent where he had been impressed with the canals he saw. He thought that a similar waterway could be built to take coal the ten miles or so to Manchester. A major obstacle on the route was the River Irwell which would have to be crossed. The Duke, having seen aqueducts on the continent, no doubt told his engineer, James Brindley, all about them. The story goes that when Brindley, who had never had a formal education and rarely committed his plans to paper, had to make a presentation to a parliamentary committee, he made a model of his proposed aqueduct out of Cheshire cheese.

The canal was a roaring success. It was such an easy and efficient way of transporting large quantities of coal - compared to horse-drawn wagons on rutted, muddy roads - that the price of coal in Manchester dropped dramatically as supply increased. Everyone was happy.

Wigan flashes

2016-03-15T18:20:00.000+00:00

Tufted ducks dive below the surface while black-headed gulls make a racket, arguing with each other as they flap above the cold water or bob on its wavelets. A coot squeaks and geese honk.

I am moored near the Wigan ‘flashes’, lakes alongside the canal on the outskirts of Wigan. The lakes - or ‘flashes’ - formed as a result of subsidence from coal mining at the Ince Moss colliery that began extracting coal in 1863 and continued until the late 1960s. In its early days at least, up to one million tonnes of coal a year was being brought out of the ground in these parts. In the 1930s, George Orwell visited this stretch of canal one winter during research for his book, The Road to Wigan Pier. He writes:

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ - pools of stagnant water that has seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The flashes were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.

How things change. Under a hundred years later and this area is famed for its water fowl rather than its foul water. There’s plenty of vegetation; birch trees and goat willow, just beginning to blossom, edges the lakes. The towpath is no longer mud and cinders where factory workers clop in clogs, rather a smooth concrete path where people cycle and dog-walkers and bird-watchers amble, binoculars and cameras at the ready.

Building on his fame that he earned from Down and out in Paris and London, Orwell visited many working class households in northern England to document their dire living conditions. He spent much of his time in Wigan, where he rented a room that he shared with four other men, the beds so crammed together that he couldn’t stretch out completely without his feet touching another lodger.

That were luxury. On his visits to the homes of coal miners and mill workers in Wigan he found as many as eleven people sleeping in one bedroom, sharing beds in shifts, with outside toilets shared by over 30 people. Despite the extreme poverty, the bugs, lice and stench, he claims to have liked Wigan very much ‘the people, not the scenery.’

The one fault he found with it, he writes, is that he did not get to see ‘the celebrated Wigan pier which he had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan pier has been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.’

According to Wigan Museum, the history of ‘Wigan pier’ goes back to the 19th century when a train with pleasure-trippers setting out to nearby coastal Southport - with its famed pier - became delayed in Wigan. When someone asked ‘where are we?’ a wag looked out of the window to see a long gantry and wharf leading to the canal-side at Wigan and shouted ‘Wigan pier!’ Despite it’s non-existence, Wigan is still synonymous with its ‘pier’, often confusing people to think - as I have in the past - that Wigan is by the sea.

Today, the passing boater might think that the historic location of Wigan Pier has been determined after all. The pub at the bottom of the flight of Wigan locks, a converted 18th century warehouse, is called ‘The Orwell, Wigan Pier’. The area is called ‘Wigan Pier Quarter’ with ambitious plans for redevelopment. Nearby, a large mill, Trencherfield, has been restored into apartments. The former mill contains an enormous working steam engine that is fired up for visitors on occasional Sundays, but not, unfortunately, while I was in the area.

More recently, Wigan Pier was the name of a night club that closed in 2010. It featured on BBC Radio 4 the other day, in Laura Barton’s Notes from a musical island. According to one interviewee, the club was “where people threw shapes,” and DJs “put a donk on it.”

A ‘donk’, the former clubber explained, is “a bass line on the off-beat”, a sound that Barton thought “almost industrial,” reminiscent of the mills where, said an old timer, workers would “sway t’ rhythm o’ t’ loom.”

The clack of looms and huff and puff of steam engines in Wigan is now absent. The noise of the city you hear from the canal is the roar of boy-racers and the wail of sirens. People don’t sway t’ rhythm o’ t’ loom any more and their ‘shapes’ are the result of too many pies, a culinary delight - along with tripe - for which Wigan is famed. (The Bank Coffeeshop in Wigan has ‘famous Wigan tapas’ on its menu. It consists of three miniature pies on mash with mushy peas.) For a town whose residents are known - somewhat derogatorily - as ‘Pie-eaters’ it’s fitting that some of the main employers these days are food companies: Heinz, Waterfields bakers and AB World Foods - makers of Patak’s pickles and Tabasco sauce - are listed as major Wigan businesses by investinmanchester.com

Here on the outskirts of Wigan, moored adjacent to one of the flashes, I’m away from road traffic, the pickles and pies. The only sounds are the birds squabbling and honking and the distant rumble of trains and occasional planes. The only industry I can spy from my window is that of a coot searching endlessly for something tasty among the weeds. My nearest food shop is a couple of miles cycle ride away.

Journey times

2016-03-09T21:11:00.001+00:00

It’s taken me an age to reach, here, Appley Bridge, near Wigan on the Leeds & Liverpool canal. Eight months ago to the day - July 9th 2015 - I departed from the northernmost terminus of the joined inland waterway system in England and Wales - Tewitfield on the border of Lancashire and Cumbria.

According to the excellent journey planning website, canalplan.org.uk the distance by waterways from Tewitfield to this West Lancashire village is just 63 miles, ¼ furlong and 18 locks. “There are at least 9 moveable bridges; 18 small aqueducts or underbridges and and 1 major aqueduct (Lune Aqueduct). This is made up of 55 miles, 5 furlongs of broad canals; 7 miles, 3¼ furlongs of tidal rivers; 18 broad locks,” it says. The site estimates that the journey is possible in four leisurely days cruising of six hours each.

So how has it taken me eight months? Well, firstly, I like to stop every few miles for a few days, perhaps for as long as two weeks, the maximum time allowed. There was Carnforth, with its train station (the setting for the film Brief Encounter) that gave me easy access to the Cumbrian coast, the Arnside and Silverdale AONB and the flowery prom of genteel Grange over Sands; Hest Bank has views over Morecambe Bay and walks over wide and sparkling sands; Lancaster itself has its castle, coffee shops and a cycle track to Morecambe Bay; Glasson Docks has yachts, their halyards pinging in the sea breeze. There are many rural mooring spots besides. As well as stopping to explore locally, in October I left the boat in a marina for ten days while I went on a canal boating holiday (yes! really) on luxury wide-beam boat, Topsy, on the Kennet & Avon canal. It was meant to be a treat for my Mum and Dad, who were going to join me and my house-dwelling First Mate. Sadly, at the last moment, Mum and Dad had to cancel as Mum was having constant pain with what had, at that stage, been diagnosed as hiatus hernia with the added complication of possible ovarian cysts. A month later we got the devastating news that a scan showed that she had stage IV pancreatic cancer with a prognosis of just six to nine months to live. I immediately left my boat again to go to my parents home in Eastbourne to help my Dad care for my dear, lovely Mum in her last few months of life. Mum died not long after diagnosis, just 73 days later, on World Cancer Day, February 4th.

Although we didn’t get to enjoy the holiday cruising on the Kennet & Avon, the journey we subsequently shared - the end of her life - was one whose memory I will always cherish. I wanted it to be a much longer journey, longer than just two months, but that was not to be. It was a privilege to have the chance to say goodbye and tell Mum, many times, how much I loved her; to reminisce and read her extracts from my journals about previous holidays together on the waterways which made us laugh and cry; go for short strolls with her on the seafront when she had the energy; prepare snacks to encourage her to eat; treat her to extravagantly expensive bedding to try and make her as comfortable as possible; to massage her feet with lavender oil and arrange for social services to deliver various items that would assist us as she became weaker. Dad meanwhile was in charge of drugs, helping Mum take a multitude of medicines throughout the day and night. The two of us looked after Mum until the day before she died when the pain management became too difficult. Thankfully we were able to get her admitted to St Wilfrid’s hospice in Eastbourne, where she had clearly said, early on in her illness, that she wanted to be at the end of her life’s rich and remarkable journey. Mum had been satisfied with her life, Stoical about her lot. She’d had her three scores and ten and three more besides but 73 is not old these days and Mum always looked at least ten years younger.

How I wish she’d had more time with us. A few more years, months, days. But we enjoyed what we had and for that I am grateful. Now, as Mum would no doubt be urging me to do, I have returned to the canals and to my journey.

So here I am, on the outskirts of Appley Bridge, a village with a train station, ongoing housing development and a canal-side industry manufacturing roofing materials. Residents in Appley Bridge might be inclined to look heavenwards, to their roof tiles and beyond. In 1914, a 28lb 13oz lump of rock flared through the October night sky, a fireball with a tail, accompanied by thunderous explosions. The Appley Bridge meteorite fell to earth in a farmer’s field “after 4.6 billion years travelling through space,” it says in a book in Wigan Museum.

It puts my planned long journey into perspective. I hope to voyage for many miles and locks along the canals and rivers to reach the waterways of southern England. Prior to Mum’s death, I was contemplating voyaging the entirety of the Leeds & Liverpool canal to Leeds and then down the length of eastern England on the tidal Trent but that route would be much longer and takes me almost as far north again as Tewitfield before turning to head south. While I love this nomadic life of a solo continuous cruiser and the way of a hermit suits me, following Mum’s death, I have a yearning to be geographically - and emotionally - nearer to Sussex and my family: to my Dad, my sister, my nieces and closer to the only land that I own in the world - my Mum’s grave, at the foot of the South Downs.

From my Nicholsons waterways atlas of Britain, I see that apart from the little-known Baybridge canal, which hasn’t been in use since the 19th century, there’s no canal in all of Sussex, no navigable river that connects with the rest of the system. The closest I could get would be the River Medway but that would necessitate cruising down the Thames estuary out to the North Sea before heading back towards Chatham. I’m not sure if I’m brave enough for that. Otherwise, the closest geographically is the Wey & Godalming Navigation in Surrey. This connects to the Thames and thus to the 2,000 miles of waterways network.

According to the trusty and ever-useful canalplan.org.uk, the distance from Appley Bridge to Godalming by the waterways is 323 miles, 4¼ furlongs and 168 locks. “This is made up of 171 miles, 2¼ furlongs of narrow canals; 49 miles, 7¼ furlongs of broad canals; 19 miles, 6 furlongs of small rivers; 82 miles, 4¾ furlongs of large rivers; 115 narrow locks; 23 broad locks; 30 large locks.” If I cruise for seven hours each day, the calculated journey time is 21 days. But if it takes me eight months to make a journey that could be completed in four days, I calculate that, at an equivalent pace, it will be three and a half years before I’m mooring up in Godalming. Three and a half years is insignificant in the 4.6 billion year journey time of a meteorite travelling through space, but even so, perhaps it’s time to get a move on? Perhaps one year? Or maybe two.

I can't get off to a speedy start though as there are still winter stoppages on the canals. The Barton swing aqueduct on the (privately owned) Bridgewater canal is closed for repair work until 20th March.

For now though, this peaceful mooring spot and signs of spring bring me solace. Tiny tender green leaves are appearing on some branches of a tree nearby. From the hedgerows, a pheasant calls, sounding like a damp engine trying to start, and a blackbird sings mellifluously.

Back to boating

2016-03-08T10:04:00.001+00:00

The tete a tete narcissi were flowering in my wooden flower box on the roof of my boat when I got back to it yesterday, after many weeks away. The dinky yellow trumpets faced the sun and were nodding gently in the breeze. They were my mum’s favourite spring flowers. It was as if she were welcoming me back to the boat, back to my home. Perhaps she’d laid on the sunshine and the brilliant blue sky too? It was good to be back on board. All was in order. Thank you to the people of the village of Parbold, the Canal and River Trust and the kind dog-walker, Tony, who kept an eye on my home while I’ve been away helping my Dad to care for my dear, wonderful Mum who died on February 4th. She was only 73 and very youthful. I’d bought her a pot of bulbs of tete a tete narcissi back in November, when she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, hoping she may get to see them bloom. She got to see the green shoots but her pot of bulbs - at my parents’ home in Eastbourne - still hasn’t flowered.

I cruised out of Parbold. Phragmites reeds, straw-coloured and brittle dry, tickled the air and swayed gently as I passed, like others had on November 24th, the day after Mum told me of her diagnosis. Back then, I remember the reeds near New Lane as being green and with more inflorescence. They brushed the sky as I cruised by, like a mother caressing her child’s forehead. Don’t worry they seemed to say, as they bowed towards me in the drag of the boat as I passed, but I bawled into the wind and cold rain that day.

Yesterday, the straw-yellow reeds barely moved. They harboured plastic bottles and remnants of takeaway containers in the thick comb of their stems in the water. Trees lined the banks, leaning in towards the canal, growing determinedly through old stone walls. The ground was rust red with autumn leaves. The trees, their trunks all green with algae and lichen, were bare of leaves but buds of new life are just beginning to show, green buds on what looked like sycamores. Some trees - alder? - had pink catkins.

Walkers were out in force, with one group of about fifty grey-haired ramblers. They waved and smiled. People called out. “That looks great, I envy you!” I bimbled along at 3mph or so, not in any hurry; under fine stone bridges and besides wooded slopes until I reached the deep lock, 91, in less than an hour. I went through slowly, opening just one ground paddle at first, raising it just one or two teeth of its ratchet at a time, until the boat had risen high in the chamber on thousands of gallons of water welling up from an unseen opening and then I raised both the gate paddles; the final few hundred gallons of canal water gushing through, white and raging.

I moored up at the top of the lock, where there’s another branch with two abandoned locks that were, I presume, replaced by the one deep lock at one time? The now-closed branch of the canal makes for a quiet off-side mooring spot, south-facing, quiet, with a view of trees and fields.

The narcissi face the view and the arc of the sun across the sky.

Liverpool Link

2015-11-09T20:18:00.000+00:00

My plan was to head in to Liverpool after crossing back over the Ribble from the Lancaster Canal.

In early October, the Ribble estuary was calm and waveless, unlike when I made the crossing in the other direction in May. Sunbeams filtered through grey clouds and it was a pleasant couple of hours cruising down the River Ribble and up the River Douglas. The hairiest moment was battling an unexpectedly strong current when entering Tarleton lock.

So now here I am on the Leeds & Liverpool canal again. I had thought that I would get going with my long voyage east and then southwards and start heading towards Leeds straight away. However, fellow boaters had enthused about Liverpool and Albert Dock and so I decided I would head there first and then turn around and cruise the whole 127 miles and 91 locks of the Leeds & Liverpool which celebrates its bicentenary next year. I found this website and then followed the link for navigational advice about this waterway and consulted the relevant northwestern winter stoppages map. There was nothing that would stop me getting in to Liverpool it seemed.

The map was misleading. I now discover that it's not possible to go in to Liverpool until April as, from November until April, CRT closes 'the Liverpool Link' as it's called. Even though travelling through Liverpool seems no more challenging than passing through Manchester on the canals, CRT controls the passage of boats and doesn't allow boaters to operate locks or swing bridges. Apparently one of the bridges is a busy road, so I can understand a need to control that but I'm not sure why we can't operate the locks.

It's a shame CRT don't make it clear that the Liverpool Link closes in winter. I've given some feedback and they say they will from now on but when I looked just now, all is the same. CRT's response was that "the Liverpool Link always closes in winter" but for those of us new to the area, that's not very useful. We need clear information on the internet. The Link's annual closure is not even mentioned on this comprehensive CRT skippers' guide that I downloaded from the above web address.

Hey ho, I'm not going to hang around til April I don't think. So I'll miss cruising in front of the Liver Building on the waterfront while the Mersey ferry plays 'ferry cross the Mersey'. Maybe this glimpse of the link - from the Museum of Liverpool - is as much of an experience as I'll get. I used to think well of CRT, now I'm not so sure.

Pricked on the Lites with a bodkin

2015-09-16T16:39:00.000+01:00

All the news about Mr Corbyn and his dislike of pomp and pageantry and singing the national anthem has made me think of this event I attended - by chance - in Lancaster in May. I discovered that I didn't even know the words to the first verse of the national anthem, not the way it's sung in Lancashire anyway.

Lancaster was once known as the ‘hanging town’ as, outside London, they hanged more people – on Castle Hill – than anywhere else in Britain. Today, the hanging in the castle is of the ceremonial kind and visitors can attend – for free.

The hanging of the High Sheriff’s shield takes place each May. It’s a classic piece of British pageantry in the Priory and neighbouring Shire Room of Lancaster Castle. I seemed to be the only tourist.

The Priory, chandeliers blazing with real candles, sun shining through stained glass windows, was full as if for a posh wedding: men in suits, women in hats of all creations, air-kissing and exclaiming quietly over outfits. Did they realise they would soon be outshone in the fashion department…by elderly men?

The dark oak pew was cool, the organ played, trumpets fanfared. A man’s voice called from the back, asking us to be upstanding for the Right Worshipful Mayor of Lancaster and his procession. A glance at the order of service listed the order of dignitaries, starting with - try not to giggle - the Mayor’s Beadle. Was he the man in the dark coat, medals and gold-braided top hat carrying a large curtain pole with an urn on one end? I can’t remember, there were so many costumes, so many ruffs and feathers, wigs, robes and chains over the next few minutes: the Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire’s Procession, the High Sheriff and Judges, the clergy and choir. I lost track of who was who. The least ruffed person of all was a girl in a baseball cap who looked as if she’d just popped out of JD Sports carrying a ceremonial sword. She, I worked out, was the High Sheriff’s cadet. The rest of the cast had delved deep into the historic castle’s dressing up box, fetching out scarlets and lace, shiny wands, richly embroidered cloaks, metallic braid and funny hats. I particularly admired the ostrich plumed tricorne of the Assistant Chief Constable (I think) but of course, he didn’t actually wear it, just carried it against his gold embroidered breast, like a bird of paradise who’d been in a tussle. One of the bewigged judges was straight out of Dickens, all rosy cheeks; as round as he was tall, walking with a cane. I imagine children reared on Harry Potter’s adventures might actually stop looking down at a smartphone for a moment and observe an event in real life, if you can call it that. And the names – the Under Sheriff of the County Palatine of Lancaster; Norroy & Ulster King of Arms and Mrs Lord-Lieutenant, aka Lady Shuttleworth. Thank goodness I was on my own at the back (dressed as smartly as I could muster in a short-sleeved shirt that could have done with an iron) or I might have been stuffing a hanky into my mouth.

There followed a fairly standard service with the usual audience participation of standing, kneeling, standing again. The High Sheriff – one of very few women to have the role - read The Lesson, dressed in a purple velvet dress and with a hat that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a van Dyck portrait: wide brimmed velvet, with ostrich plumes.

The service climaxed with the National Anthem, a most peculiar version: “God save our gracious Queen! Long live our noble Duke!” I thought at first that the Bishop – or whoever was in charge – had decided that Philip deserves a look in, but no, the Duke in question is the Duke of Lancaster. Who’s he? I hear you ask. It is…Her Majesty. I never knew. There’s a pub quiz question if ever I came across one. I always thought a Duke was a reservedly masculine title.

Once the cast had all trooped out, the great and good of Lancashire tottered after them in high heels and suits – and I followed with my rucksack. The Bishop – or three – shook hands with each and every one.

The scene outside: two men on horses with helmets and plumes, carrying pendants on poles in front of the castle. A photographer herded the fancy-dress bunch together for a group photo. The horses, framing the scene, pissed great lakes and dolloped dung on the cobbles. Another photographer from Lancashire Life snapped the commoners competing for sartorial supremacy. He ignored me.

We still hadn’t seen any hanging, I realised, shield or otherwise. Was this about to happen? The fact that the congregation was still standing about shivering in delicate finery in the unseasonable May chill suggested that this was just an interval and the main action was yet to take place. I asked a man with medals on his chest and he told me to follow the others in to the castle.

A visit to the castle usually costs £8 and involves a compulsory 75-minute tour. Yet, here I was entering its gates between two horse-guards, following a train of people in robes, for free. Up uneven steps, past toilets and into the Georgian splendour of the Civil Court, all high ceilings, elaborate masonry and dark wooden pews surrounding a flag of the Duchy of Lancaster. I took a seat on a stackable chair at the back of the grey stone room. On the walls behind us hung shields with the coats of arms and names of former High Sheriffs, dating back centuries.

Didn’t the vicar go on? whispered a woman next to me with a confection on her head. And it’s so cold and we have to walk a mile to the Town Hall for lunch next, she said. Oh do we? I asked, marvelling at Lancaster’s benevolence. Perhaps that’s just for invited guests? I wondered. Yes, of course, we have an invitation, she said. And I realised she was possibly questioning my credentials, me in my best stay-wrinkled shirt and trousers, no tie, no suit. The service and this ceremony are open to all, I whispered. I’m just visiting Lancaster and happened to go into the Priory yesterday and a man who works there told me about the service and said anyone was welcome. Oh, she said. But the lunch is invitation only. We’re friends of the Parkers. Who are they? I asked and she tried to tell me, while reapplying some lippy in the shadow of her brimmed hat, that it was the Parkers’ party that I was gate-crashing. Amanda Parker is the new High Sheriff. What does a High Sheriff do exactly? I asked. That’s a good question she said and demurred to her husband who said he wasn’t too sure but pointed me to the back of the full-colour order of service which explained, none-too-enlighteningly that ‘The office of High Sheriff has its roots in Saxon times and is the oldest continuous secular office under the Crown. The High Sheriff is the Keeper of the The Queen’s Peace in the County. The Office is held for one year during which the High Sheriff is responsible for the well-being of Her Majesty’s Judges in the County, and other public duties.’ So that’s clear now then. So is it a full-time job? I asked. Or a ceremonial position? Ceremonial, we concluded. I mean if it were a full-time job, Her Majesty may come under scrutiny by the Department of Work and Pensions for her recruitment procedures. The encyclopaedic section of the order of service goes on to explain that out of a short list presented to her by her Lord-Lieutenant ‘Her Majesty ‘pricks’ the name of the three High Sheriffs on the Lites with a bodkin.’ That’s clear then. A standard royal recruitment procedure no doubt.

The quiet chatter throughout the echoing chamber was brought to an abrupt end by a health and safety announcement from a man in 21^st century casual wear reminding us – along with the easy-stack chairs –that we were indeed in an elaborate play. Some of the steps are uneven he said. There aren’t white lines on the edges of all of them as we are a Grade I listed building.

Perhaps there was trumpet fanfare next – from trumpeters dressed in disappointing suits that could have been from Burtons – and the entrance of the party hostess in her damson velvet. I don’t recall exactly, it all blurs like some mad absinthe induced dream, but next thing I remember is we were all standing and the constable of the castle, another older woman in purple (are they fans of that poem? all this is better than running a walking stick down railings as a bit of later life entertainment) was signalling rather abruptly for us to sit down.

She swiftly delegated to a man with a massive wand, propped up by his pulpit, who read from a scroll about felons and chattels and year of our Lord and in the sixty third year of the reign and much more that would have enlightened me about the role of the High Sheriff had I understood it or been able to pay attention or even do a video recording to refer to later but it seemed better to let it all wash over me like a drug induced hallucination which was brought to a crashing end by the wand falling noisily to the floor.

I can’t remember which character it was who then read some of Amanda Jane Parker’s credentials – about her paint-balling business, her IT empire, her two children and her house and garden that she opens to the public. But before long she was signing her name in a book and then ascending the steps from the wooden stage area to the back wall to hang her shield. As she hung it there - a piece of history for how many hundreds of years to come? – everyone applauded rapturously. The performance of the year was over and now, for the friends of Amanda, it was what they’d all been waiting for - lunch time.

Glasson Docks

2015-08-25T18:56:00.001+01:00

If Glasson Docks were in the southwest of England, the place would be heaving with grockles by now. There’d be ice-cream vans and afternoon tea places and the car park would always be full. But it’s in the northwest of England and the car park – that costs £1 for 24 hours – is almost always empty. There’s just one shop where the shelves are bare apart from a few over-ripe bananas, the Lancaster Guardian, and boxes of tea bags.

The docks aren’t postcard pretty it has to be said – they’re industrial in a small-scale. ‘Grain and timber were its main imports and coal its main export’, it says in The complete guide to the Lancaster Canal. (There’s still a Glasson Grain warehouse in operation.) Prior to the opening of the docks, Lancaster’s connection with the sea had been up the Lune estuary but as ships became bigger and the river silted up, this route was no longer possible. In 1826, the docks were connected with the canal. Today it’s mostly yachts that moor in Glasson basin, occasionally going through a lock to the docks proper and then another lock to the sea.

A week ago, I voyaged down the flower-edged and very bucolic Glasson arm, with its six locks. Moored here in the basin, is as near to the sea as I’ll go at the moment – until my passage back across the Ribble, now likely to be in October.

I love the flavour of the sea and maritime life being moored amongst the yachts. In the wind there’s a sound of screaming banshees from their rigging. Waves slap the sides of the boat. In winter apparently, breakers wash over the walls of the basin. Last year they sank a wooden boat that now lies wrecked, still roped to its moorings. But when it’s calm, the expanse of water in the basin is a vast watercolour of clouds and rippling masts.

On a sunny morning, on the shore of the Lune estuary, sun sparkles through myriad dewdrops and shines through feathery flowers of young reeds, their backlit inflorescences like thousands of candles. Marsh heather – that’s what the locals call it – is bright purple; samphire grows on the saltmarsh. On top of the saltmarsh a yacht is marooned. “It’s been there for years,” says a local dog-walker. It broke free of its moorings on a very high tide and has been perched on the grass near the River Conder since, propped upright on its keel fins, like Noah’s ark waiting for a deluge, somewhere for starlings to perch.

On the mudbanks, waders of all sorts pipe and whistle and scurry about like little butlers in a hurry. Lapwings, that, until now, I’ve only seen in inland fields, where their mad flapping flight detracts from their nests, seem altogether more graceful here. They flock together, their flight shimmering as if through a heat haze. In the distance, Helvellyn and other hills of the Lake District are visible behind a row of pylons, looping cables across the Lune. They look like bars of music waiting for some notes.

Four wind turbines begin to turn slowly. The sky is ominously grey. I get back to the boat with the dogs and it starts to rain. My wind turbine is spinning madly. Inside, it sounds as if someone is angle-grinding above my bed and the boat rocks in the waves.

Luxury homelessness

2015-07-30T07:37:00.000+01:00

Out walking the towpath the other day near Carnforth, I came across a portable solar panel, seemingly abandoned, charging up a device in a plastic ziploc bag.

I was about to pick it up, when I noticed a tent nearby under some trees. Next to it a man was playing a game of black and white counters. A bicycle and a trailer were parked by his small tent. “Yes, that’s mine, I’m just charging up my phone,” he said, as he sat in his fisherman’s chair. He wasn’t a fisherman though. He is homeless and this was his home and the sum total of his belongings. “I’m trying to cycle to Durham to visit a mate but my phone’s died and I don’t have a map,” he said by way of explanation. He asked if I could do him a favour and fill up his five-litre water container. I said I could if he could wait until morning before I returned with it. The next morning I cycled about a mile down the path from my boat to take him his water. He’d spent the night on the towpath, under the trees, with his wood-fired stove and packs of freeze dried food, a guitar, his game of ‘Go’ and his laptop. “It’s luxury homelessness,” he said of his lifestyle, with a smile. “I wasn’t ready for suicide so I took to the road. Homelessness is a state of mind anyway, I’d much rather live like this than be chained to a mortgage,” he said, as a heron flew past with a cronk. The start of his story is not uncommon: a “very messy relationship breakdown”, psychiatric problems, losing his job and then his house but the way he’s dealing with it is fairly unique. Since September 2014 he’s lived like this, pulling his belongings behind him in a wagon attached to his bicycle, sleeping in his tent, usually on towpaths. He started on the Sussex coast and now he’s here in Lancashire, aiming to get to Durham. He used to be in the army he explained and has an army pension due to deafness in one ear, “but it’s due to run out in a couple of years and I don’t know what I’ll do then but I love this life, it keeps me calm,” he scratched his head with a hand of large finger nails painted black. “I had them done at a nail salon,” he explained. “They’re acrylic. Mine keep breaking” and I realised they were so he could play the guitar. I asked if he’d play me something and he took the guitar out of his case and strummed a beautiful melancholic tune. “Dust in the wind by Kansas,” he said. “I like its message,” he said. “That’s what we all are eventually, dust in the wind.”

He doesn’t like playing in front of an audience he said, so I was privileged. “I need to get over it,” he said. I told him that I look forward to seeing him play at a festival one day.

The picture is of me with my boat home, at the end of the canal, the furthest north of the joined inland waterways in England, at Tewitfield on the Lancaster Canal, near the Cumbrian border. See previous post for more details.

The man in the story above was happy for me to write about him. He even said I could use his name.

The end of the canal

2015-07-09T10:47:00.001+01:00

I reversed my boat as far as it would go, between two other narrowboats moored either side. The occupant of one poked her head out, tousled her hair with an early morning sigh and enquired what I was doing. I explained. “Would you like me to take a picture?” she asked, a thought bubble reading ‘uh-oh we’ve got a right one here’. I gave her my phone and she stood on a grassy bank above the culvert that brings water from the orphaned arm of the canal, hidden the other side of an embankment and road. The stern of my boat, its flaking red and yellow ‘tunnel bands’ and rope fender growing with moss, is nudging the steel platform over the culvert. I’m looking back over the tiller, dressed for a cool July morning.

Ever since I first pored over a Nicholson’s Inland Waterways map of Great Britain, five years ago, I’d wanted to reach here. This northernmost canal in England and Wales wends its way beside the Lancashire coast, continuing with a dotted line – meaning ‘under restoration’ - all the way to Kendal where the map says ‘Cumbrian Mountains’. So wild, so northern, so distant.

I’m a southerner, born in Gloucestershire, raised in Wiltshire and before my new episode as a water gypsy, resident in London for ten years. To me, Birmingham was always ‘north’. Cumbria was so far away it was practically Scotland, which it is of course: the last English county before the border on the west. On my now rather tatty Inland Waterways map of Great Britain, England comes to an abrupt halt short of the Scottish border. There is no need to show any further north than Middlesborough where a discrete 13-mile stretch of River Tees in is the furthest north navigable inland waterway in England. Not being connected to the rest of the 2,000 miles of inland waterway of England and Wales however, this did not interest me. I couldn’t get there in my 57ft narrowboat unless I transported it on a lorry or was fool enough to take the flat-bottomed steel vessel (designed for calm canals just a few feet deep with barely any flow) out to open sea for a journey of several hundred miles; a journey which would no doubt end with the boat – my home - at the bottom of the ocean. Nor can I take my boat to Scotland, which is represented on the map by two box-outs, showing its canals. The most famous is the Caledonian Canal, that follows the fault line of the Great Glen slashing diagonally across from Fort William to Inverness, connecting five lochs with stretches of canal designed by the prodigious Victorian engineer Thomas Telford. Other canals connect Glasgow with Edinburgh and a little one sits beguilingly across an isthmus near the islands: the Crinan Canal, just nine miles long with 15 locks says the map. But I digress. I’m turning into a canal nerd.

As I was saying, the northernmost point you can reach in a narrowboat in England is Tewitfield, a hamlet, (or rather a pub and a garden centre on a main road), in north Lancashire on the border with Cumbria, near the M6. To get here from the rest of the canal system means you have to make a daring crossing of the Ribble estuary. I made the crossing in May. Now, here I am, at the northernmost limit of the joined canal system in England and Wales. Finally.

Some history: Tewitfield was the original terminus of the Lancaster Canal in 1819, until a few decades later when it was completed to Kendal, some 14-miles further north. The canal was known as the ‘Black & White’ as its main cargoes were coal and limestone, although it also carried gunpowder, wool and rocks. The boats were 72ft long, 14ft wide iron vessels called Lancaster Barges. Not far from Kendal, a horse-drawn tramway brought gunpowder from a ‘manufactory’ to the canal to be loaded on to barges at a wharf. The horses were shod with copper or bronze rather than iron so that they wouldn’t create sparks as they walked along the tracks carrying tons of gunpowder.

When the railways came along in the first half of the 19^th century, most cargo-carrying moved to the trains and the canal nearly choked with weeds. The last cargo boat to pass through Hincaster tunnel did so in 1944, so it says on an information board near the tunnel’s mouth. Did they know they would be the last? Was there a valedictory service and a closing ceremony or did someone just realise one day that they hadn’t seen a boat on the move since last year “or was it the year before?”

So in the 1960s when the latest transport infrastructure was being constructed, there was no thought given to conserving the canal, or what remained of it, and bulldozers pushed their way right across it to make way for the M6 and other roads. They buried the canal in pipes, its supply still flowing from Killington reservoir which, I’m told, can be seen from Killington Lake services on the M6.

Beyond Tewitfield, are eight locks, the only ones on the entire 55-mile stretch between Kendal and Preston, that still flow with water but the gates are no more. The water rushes through like a series of waterfalls. The towpath is still mowed by Canal & River Trust; the canal still dredged and cleared of weed. To say the Northern Reaches – as this 14-mile stretch is called - is un-navigable is not entirely true. Canoeists and kayakers paddle through the duckweed, at least until a territorial swan starts attacking them. At the village of Crooklands there is one small and solitary narrowboat owned by the Lancaster Canal Trust that I presume does fund-raising and awareness raising cruises along a short navigable stretch, trying to raise the millions of pounds required to restore the locks and squeeze the canal under the roads and motorway so that it can all be joined up again one day.

North of Crooklands, the canal is dry, its bed full of nettles and ash trees or ploughed and growing with wheat, its embankments still visible. Stone bridges arch over grass; a ‘winding’ hole (where boats turn around) is like a grass-banked amphitheatre. A solitary swallow swoops low over what was the bed of the canal, as if with some distant memory of its wateriness. A tortoiseshell flits between clover and grasses on the bank. “It would be better with water in it,” says a passing walker as I sit there on its bank. “It’s still beautiful like this,” I say. “Yes,” he agrees. “I don’t think they’ll ever complete it,” he says. “I’m not so sure,” I reply. “There seems to be quite a strong movement in favour of restoring it.” “Ah well they’ve been talking about it for years,” he counters.

Whether or not the ‘northern reaches’ are ever re-attached to the rest of the system, I hope this isolated stretch of canal continues to be maintained as a linear park, with the towpath mown so you can walk along its meadowsweet scented route.

With the canal’s edges thick with flag irises, water lilies and tall whispering reeds, fields of cattle and arching stone bridges, little jetties for anglers that make for perfect places to sit and dangle your feet in the water, it is a gentle green corridor; a counterpoint to the mad hurtling rush of the nearby motorway.

I caught the 555 bus to Kendal from opposite the Longlands Hotel in Tewitfield, just a two minute stroll from the canal. From Kendal it was a leisurely seven-hour walk, including refreshment stops, back to my boat in Tewitfield. I packed a flask and sandwiches.

Out to sea

2015-06-20T12:17:00.001+01:00

This must be the only canal in England with a sea view. Moored at Hest Bank, I can see the hills of the Lake District across a wide glittering bay and tidal sands. It’s only a few minutes’ walk down to the shore.

Step over the railway line that hugs the coast and to the left is a pebble beach and then a promenade that leads to Morecambe, where sailors set off in dinghies when the tide is in. To the right, sheep graze on remnants of salt marsh and oyster catchers poke their bright orange bills into the sand, looking for dinner. Clumps of the salt marsh have eroded at the edge so that you discover that the seaweed covered rocks aren’t rocks at all, but springy and soft, like child-friendly rocks.

When the tide is out, the ruins of a wharf are visible out in the sands. It’s hard to believe that ships used to sail here and unload cargoes that would be carried up to the canal by horse and cart. The canal was built because by the end of the 18th century, the River Lune at Lancaster was silting up and ships were becoming too large to navigate up there. Glasson Dock connected Lancaster to the sea again, via the canal and later a railway between Glasson and Lancaster.

I’ve not taken the boat down the six locks to Glasson Basin yet but I have cycled there. It’s odd seeing narrowboats moored next to yachts. One narrowboat moored there is Predator 3, whose owners Cyril and Jackie are planning to steer out through the sea lock and south to Liverpool. “It’s 53 miles if we follow the markers or 35 miles if we go across the sand banks,” says Jackie without a trace of anxiety in her voice. The intrepid couple have crossed most of the estuaries you can do in a narrowboat – The Wash, Severn Estuary and the Ribble. Now they’re preparing to navigate the Irish Sea. I think I’d rather just look at it (or, when the tide’s out, the biggest area of tidal sands and mudflats in Britain) sparkling in the bay, while sitting on the roof of my boat moored safely on the canal.

Renewable energy

2015-05-24T11:26:00.001+01:00

'I don't believe in ageing, I believe in ever altering one's aspect to the sun,' wrote Virginia Woolf, quoted in a BBC Radio 4 programme, 'Something Understood' which, this week, had ageing as the theme.
What I love about boat life is mooring up to make the most of the sunshine, altering one's aspect to the sun quite literally.
The Lancaster Canal, being a contour canal with 41 miles of lock-free cruising, is mostly in flat surrounds, with no hills to cast a shadow - unlike the Rochdale Canal - so it's quite easy to find somewhere, away from hedges and trees, that will be in sun for most of the day.
This spot - pictured - not far from Preston was perfect for the day's sun, whose energy I need to harvest more keenly at the moment as - since my engine repair - it is now my only source of domestic power to run laptop, water pumps, lights. I can no longer charge domestic batteries by running the engine. So, as the day passes and the sun arcs in the heavens, I alter the aspect of my extra 60W solar panel that I bought from Dave the engineer, to capture as much solar energy as possible.
The situation has spurred me on to make the most of renewables like never before and so I've bought a new, unused Rutland 913 windcharger which I was very lucky to find on eBay. I collect it next week and then it's just the rather major task of rigging it up. Any advice gladly received.

Tigerish waters

2015-05-18T10:54:00.000+01:00

For many a year now, I have been half in love with the idea of cruising on the Lancaster Canal. On a map of Britain, one that highlights navigable waterways rather than roads or railways, you see that the Lancaster Canal is the northernmost in England, reaching almost to the Lake District in Cumbria. Indeed the canal used to reach Kendal but because the M6 was built across it, the last 14 miles is now closed to navigation. In the excellent Nicholson guidebook you can see that the route of the remaining navigable section twists and turns through Lancashire countryside and sometimes hugs the northwest coast so tightly that you must be able to see the sea from your boat and the beach would be just a short walk away. If you want, you can descend a few locks of the Glasson arm and moor in a harbour. I imagine waves slapping against the hull, the tang of seaweed in the air and gulls mewing. Morecambe Bay and Blackpool are on your doorstep.

The problem is that the Lancaster Canal, a discrete 43 miles of lock-free cruising in rural Lancashire, is separated from the rest of the canal system. Until 2002 that was how it remained - a little-used waterway where a few fibreglass river cruisers pootled up and down. But now there is the ‘Ribble Link’ that connects the Lancaster Canal with the rest of the canal system via the Ribble estuary. It means an adventurous passage that has to be booked with Canal and River Trust well in advance and on which you need lifejackets, an anchor with 30m of chain and rope and, if you’re following the book to the letter, distress flares. Doing the Ribble Link to the Lancaster Canal entails cruising against an incoming tide for five miles on the River Douglas until you reach the wide junction with the River Ribble, where you take a dogleg turn to avoid submerged mudflats before heading inland to then turn again into a little tidal brook, through an open steel gate of a sea lock that, when shut behind you, holds the tidal water in the brook. When you reach the mooring pontoon of Savick Brook, you breathe a sigh of relief that you are now safe from the ‘mad weir of tigerish waters.’ After two hours in which you are more or less out to sea, with anchor at the ready, you now simply have to negotiate this twisting narrow ditch with eight locks, the last three of which – a staircase - you will have to go through backwards if you are too long to turn in the little pound. And so there I was on Saturday afternoon, reversing out onto the Lancaster Canal after the most exciting day of cruising yet.

The wind was a challenge. It was ‘borderline’ as to whether we would be allowed to go said lock-keeper Roger at Tarleton, and up to us to decide. The bank-side cow parsley danced vigorously as a duck guided 17? 19? tiny ducklings across the canal’s ripples. The sun was shining and so we decided to leave, joining the other six boats making the upwards crossing that morning. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it all, in the same way you may enjoy a sky-dive - that mix of terror, awe and relief when it’s all safely over. The wide water, the boat surfing at times, the river full to the brim of its bright green floodplain, the driftwood frothed banks and even the wind. The juddering vibrations through the boat were a bit disconcerting but my crew mate Dave pointed out that you feel similar vibrations in any ferry or ship at sea. The other boats – mostly narrowboats, strung out in time and space by dint of differing speeds and leaving the lock in pairs - were barely visible ahead or behind. Thankfully one ahead was bright red and had done the passage before so we knew they wouldn’t make a wrong turn and end up stranded down some muddy nameless stream, as has been known. Last to arrive at the pontoon in Savick Brook, where you all lash together while CRT staff close the sea gate behind, was live-aboard Bob in his little boat with a two-stroke air-cooled engine, towing a tender in which he keeps bicycles and tyre fenders. He had set off first but everyone had overtaken him. He has chickens on board. How have your hens fared? I asked. I bet if they’ve laid any eggs, they’re already scrambled. They’re not happy, listen to that, he said, as he lifted the cratch cover of the bow revealing chicken sounds that only an expert would know meant disgruntlement. They don’t like the movement. If any of them have laid an egg you can have it, he said. He disappeared in to the straw-filled bow. You’re in luck, and he presented me a nice brown egg, still warm from its nest.

I’ll admit it, I had been a chicken about the crossing. I imagined the worst – engine failure, being washed out to sea, the boat rolling over in the wind and waves. On a recce to the sea-lock at Tarleton, where the canal enters the tidal river Douglas, I had met a man who lives on his narrowboat, moored just next to the lock. I expect you’ve done the Ribble Link a few times? I said, hopefully. I’d never do that in a flat-bottomed narrowboat, you must be mad, he replied.

My crewmate for the day was Dave, an engineer, and his dog, Dexter, a one-year old Rottweiler. I couldn’t have done it without them.

For those who have read the previous blogpost, you may be wondering how I made it to my booked passage in time. The last thing you knew was that I needed my engine hoisted out. I was broken down in a bucolic interlude on the Rochdale Canal but the boat needed to be somewhere that a vehicle could get right up next to it on tarmac.

I walked the eight miles from where I was moored into Manchester to look at New Islington marina. There, I met Dave. I’ll take your engine out for you, he said. I’m an engineer. I used to work with DAF in Holland and BMW in Germany. Get yourself towed down here.

On Bank Holiday Monday, two kind fellow narrowboaters, Louise and David, towed me through 20 locks to the marina. Apart from going aground in one pound, all went smoothly. No-one pelted us with stones, nothing got wrapped around their prop – nor mine of course as it was not moving. The problem housing estates ‘with high levels of poverty’ where CRT volunteer lock-keepers can assist you swiftly on your passage are not wastelands of graffiti-strewn towerblocks and burnt out cars but pleasant landscaped gardens and grassy squares. True, canalside pubs are surrounded by concrete walls and razor wire rather than open seating next to the canal but the people we met were friendly, keen to watch as we passed through the locks, children waving.

And when Dave looked at my engine he said I can fix that, no need to take it out. We just need to make a new Woodruff key using proper key steel. I’ll order some off eBay, he said. And a few days later, after a three hour yoga session in the engine bay, my Beta Marine was back in action and the boat could move. But will it see me across the Ribble? I asked Dave. Of course it will. I’ll come with you to prove it, he said and offered to accompany me all the way from New Islington marina in Manchester to Tarleton, a journey that we did over four days, rather than the two weeks or so I had been planning before engine trouble put me so far behind schedule.

On the first day, wearing a back brace because he broke his back in the army when he was younger, Dave helped me through ten locks under the centre of Manchester and into Castlefield Basin. The next day dawned gloriously sunny. An hour or two later, Manchester’s smart new apartments, cheek by jowl with derelict mills, were behind us. We crossed the Manchester Ship Canal on the Barton swing aqueduct – one of the wonders of the canal system. We passed by ‘Wigan pier’ in Wigan all of which was surprisingly uplifting in its post-Orwellian phase where coal wharves – or to use the northern Viking-derived word, ‘staithes’ - have been transformed into bars and restaurants. There were lakes where swans and sailing boats danced over the water, woods where wild garlic and bluebells carpeted the ground and a motorway and railway crossing overhead, transport networks of a faster era. At the end of a ten-hour cruise, a pub, Appley Bridge Boathouse with canalside mooring, rural views and good food where we spent the first night. The next day, ahead of schedule already, we relaxed a bit. We moored up in a quiet spot before lock five on the Rufford branch of the Leeds and Liverpool canal, among an agricultural landscape of rich fertile soil, big skies and hills just visible in the distance. Then we completed the last few miles, locks and swing bridges and arrived in Tarleton, ready for our estuary passage. We didn’t get rained on once.

When, finally, we arrived on the Lancaster Canal, six hours after leaving Tarleton, Dave returned to Manchester, cycling to Preston station, a huge rucksack on his back, wearing his leather porkpie hat, Dexter the Rottweiler pulling him along.

Now I am moored in the middle of nowhere, among fields of sheep with a fine stone bridge arching over the canal. House martins and swallows choreograph a fast ballet outside my windows, swooping and diving and skimming the water with scimitar winds; joy as it flies.

My return passage across the Ribble, to rejoin the rest of the canal network once more, is not until September. I’m already looking forward to it in a strange, heart-thumping way. Whoever thought that narrowboating could give you such an adrenalin rush?

And if the world were black or white entirely

And all the charts were plain

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,

A prism of delight and pain,

We might be surer where we wished to go

Or again we might be merely

Bored but in the brute reality there is no

Road that is right entirely.

From Entirely, by Louis MacNeice

PS. Apologies if you dislike the lack of speech marks. It's not an homage to Cormack McCarthy or Terry Darlington, it's because my shift button has stopped working. Ampersands and question marks are difficult too...

April is the cruelest month

2015-04-29T06:39:00.000+01:00

There are a hundred systems on a boat, and some of them are always broken, so every voyage is a disaster more or less under control writes Terry Darlington in Narrow dog to Carcassonne. Darlington neatly sums up the precarious nature of boating. One minute all is dandy, spring is here and everything’s blooming beautiful, the next it’s back to winter, freezing, grey and rainy and you’ve broken down in the middle of nowhere, need to have the engine removed and are facing a bill as big as a pelican.

One day back in the mists of time, when the children were swimming in the canal and there was warmth in the sun, I decided, reluctantly, that I’d best set off from this spot if I’m going to make my May 16^th date to do the Ribble Passage. No sooner had I cast off than my battery warning light came on and wouldn’t go off, likewise the alarm. A big beardy Brian Blessed kind of bloke from River Canal Rescue came the next day, squeezed himself next to my engine and in doing so got indigestion from his lunch time pie. After I’d cycled off to a nearby service station to buy him some Rennies, he diagnosed a worn crank shaft caused by a Frankenstein adaption of my Beta Marine 43hp engine. Prior to the commencement of this boating life five years ago, my only exposure to the combustion engine was one year in my 20s when I shared ownership of a Citroen 2CV with my friend Sue-the-herbalist. During that year I barely raised the bonnet as it was Amy-the-mechanic we paid to get her hands dirty with anything technical. So I hadn’t realised that I had a monster under my boards; that the two big pulley wheels aren’t a standard engine component. This so-called ‘travel pack’ which is something to do with being able to run washing machines and dishwashers and all the electrics of a modern home, none of which I have, has put extra strain on the crank shaft until it has sheared the ‘woodruff key’ holding the pulley in place. We could make you a new woodruff key and file it to size and put it all back together but it might not last any time at all, says Brian. That would cost about 500 pounds and we couldn’t give you any warranty. The best option would be a new crank, or we could remove the crank and get it replated. But they’re both big jobs and we’d need to remove the engine. We’d have to get the boat somewhere we could get a hoist near to it.

Suddenly, the early promise of summer disappears. Fate has taken the tiller and pulled it hard from one direction to the next. And so, for a few days, I am powerless – apart from the sun when it deigns to shine, charging my 120W of solar panels. Thankfully, it’s a relatively bucolic interlude between Rochdale and Manchester.

Herbs and islands

2015-04-24T08:27:00.001+01:00

Bunny sells herbs and potions and sachets of herbal infusions all neatly wrapped and labelled. There are containers of parsley and thyme and dainty violet violas ‘and all manner of lovely things’. She cruises the canal network trading as ‘The Herb Boat’ from her narrowboat, Herbidacious, although the name is yet to be painted on the cabin side. I should’ve chosen something shorter and easier to paint, like ‘erb, she says, as we cruise through Rochdale on a crisp sunny day. But Herbidacious it is, the magic word from the Herb Garden, the 1970s children’s TV show with a lion called Parsley and Sage the owl.

I had met Bunny when she was moored on the Irk aqueduct, a pleasant rural spot near Middleton. She is heading in the opposite direction to me, having already come up through nearly 30 locks from Manchester’s Castlefield Basin on her voyage from Wales and heading towards Hebden Bridge. I stopped to chat as she sat outside her boat, next to some colourful planters displayed on the towpath. Like me she mostly cruises solo. Knowing what she had in store – recalcitrant locks and rafts of rubbish – I offered to help crew when she was going through Rochdale. And so, on a dawn rimed with frost, I cycled from this lovely spot where I’m still moored to meet Bunny on Herbidacious. I stowed my bike on board and off we cruised. It turns out we have more in common than cruising the waterways on our narrowboats; namely a shared passion for remote islands, especially Scottish ones. Not many people have been to St Kilda, but Bunny has several times. She has visited as an archaeologist – one of several previous incarnations. The World Heritage Site of St Kilda, 100 miles from the mainland, is an island I had long wanted to visit: the ruins of an abandoned village and dramatic horseshoe bay, the tales of the hardy islanders who eked out a living there until 80 years ago. Although it was for less than a day, I finally had my chance to visit a few years back and wrote this feature for Financial Times.

We talked about the Orkneys and Shetlands, Fair Isle and Foula. I mentioned that I’d lived in the Solomon Islands for five years and have visited many South Pacific islands: Easter Island, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, French Polynesia, Am-i-boringyou.

Now we have both reinvented ourselves and live on our own little islands, compact, remote, isolated, surrounded by water; islands that float along 2,000 miles of interconnected waterways in England and Wales as we trade our wares. Bunny with ‘all manner of lovely things’ and me, what do I have? Some words now and then, some pictures from my travels in photo-libraries. Words for sale, I shout by the cut. A penny a page, sir? A picture for tuppence? Bunny has more customers. After all, she has agrimony, borage and coltsfoot, cat-nip, calendula and chamomile. How lovely.

Spring and pylons

2015-04-23T04:21:00.001+01:00

‘There’s more sky here,’ said First Mate when we moored above lock 59 on the Rochdale Canal. I’ve left the hills behind now but there are still over 30 locks to descend before reaching the end of the Rochdale Canal at Castlefield Basin in Manchester. From nearby stretches of the canal, the Pennines are visible in the distance, brown rounded tops dotted with wind turbines.

After the angel-guided purgatory of Rochdale, this mooring spot, near Middleton, is heavenly once more, with fields of sheep and horses and relatively free of litter. Pylons detract from the beauty perhaps, depending on your view, like whips of anger with lightning’s danger, dreaming of cities*.

There’s the sound of water gurgling over a lock-side weir and occasional croaking from a frog – I think. In the field opposite a lapwing flaps and sometimes I hear its strange cry. Two oyster catchers piped overhead the other day. I didn’t know - until I consulted my bird guide - that these shore-birds do sometimes breed inland. A wren trills loudly from a branch by the boat. A heron stands sentinel by the canal, sunlight shining through its orange spear of a bill, almost through the bird itself, so reed-like. Signs of spring are everywhere, leaves bursting bright green on hawthorn and willow, catkins dusted with pollen are now falling to the ground. Daisies bloom among the grass by lock-sides; butter burr flowers are already fairly triffid-like and the sun shines hotly, so much so that it’s a relief to be inside the coolness and shade of the boat, all hatches open, letting the canal’s cool air circulate. Youths brave the murky canal water to jump into a lock to cool off. My reluctant wading the other day was enough for me. Spring is my favourite season; the promise of summer, the days warmer and longer and sudden vibrant beauty after winter’s long cold hibernation.

* 1930s poets, such as WH Auden were known as ‘the pylon poets’ thanks to this poem by Stephen Spender who saw beauty in the benefits that pylons would bring the population. I wonder if there are any wind turbine poets today?

The Pylons

By Stephen Spender

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages 

Of that stone made, 

And crumbling roads 

That turned on sudden hidden villages  

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete 

That trails black wire 

Pylons, those pillars 

Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.  

The valley with its gilt and evening look 

And the green chestnut 

Of customary root, 

Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.  

But far above and far as sight endures 

Like whips of anger 

With lightning's danger 

There runs the quick perspective of the future.  

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek 

So tall with prophecy 

Dreaming of cities 

Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck

Rochdale Rubbish

2015-04-22T10:13:00.001+01:00

Some Rochdale residents seem to treat the canal that bears their city’s name as if it were a sewer. Rafts of plastic bottles float in a scum, an arm chair swirls under its surface and shopping trolleys reach out to its banks from the mystery shop of the deep. ‘It’s such a shame,’ said a handsome man with two tiny daughters, watching as the boat entered a lock. ‘I’ve organised some litter picking with the council and put waders on up to here,’ he said, pointing to his chest, ‘got in the canal and had a go at cleaning some of it out’. That’s great, I encouraged him. Well done, that’s what it needs. We saw two women not far back and they were collecting litter using a fishing net. They had their bicycles with them and were putting all the plastic bottles and rubbish into bags that they carried on their bikes. I had applauded and thanked them. ‘We have this great heritage but so many people don’t respect it’ said the man, holding a daughter under each arm now to better see as the boat descended into its dark leaking chamber, surrounded by plastic bottles. ‘When I was a kid our school brought us to visit the canal to learn about it, that was in the 1990s, before it was restored,’ he said. It is a fantastic piece of history, I agreed. Opened in 1804, the first trans-Pennine canal. And I was reading about Rochdale, it’s full of history. The first co-operative was here and a museum about co-operatives – Rochdale Pioneers Museum – attracts visitors from around the world, especially Japan apparently, where there’s a big interest in co-operatives. The Japanese have even recreated the Rochdale museum in their own country, so I’ve been told, but some of the more adventurous ones still prefer to come and see the real thing.

I told the man with his daughters that it was great to meet people who took an interest in their canal and cared for it and asked him his name and said I might get around to writing a blog and mention him. ‘My name’s Saj,’ he said with a big smile. I hope I’ve spelt it right. Good luck to you Saj and those women we saw picking litter and the man who helped with a lock and said ‘welcome to Rochdale’ and ‘I wanted to show you a friendly face’ and bemoaned the council cuts that have affected litter clearing but also, more importantly perhaps, youth work. ‘We’ve met several friendly faces so far today,’ I reassured the man pushing the lock beam. The sun was shining, it was the most beautiful day and here were all these kind and caring people. I had a little moment. My anxiety about cruising through Rochdale was unfounded. But that was all before a particularly litter-strewn stretch, where the backs of people’s houses onto the canal are nothing more than a rubbish tip and where, despite cruising slowly, a massive piece of plastic suddenly got wrapped around the prop. Ah’m ready to fling me clog, I thought. An angler on the shore, hearing my cursing and calling through to First Mate for a kitchen knife, offered me his more substantial glinting blade. There was so much of the plastic sheet, so tightly wound up on itself into a thick tube that I seriously wondered if it was a human arm wrapped up. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me’ said the angler, Chris, ‘if there were human remains in this canal.’ Attacking the plastic mass from the weed hatch didn’t seem to work so I decided I’d have to get in the cut. I was up to my chest in the cold water, wishing I had Saj’s waders, wearing rubber boots, thick mud under foot, hacking and sawing with Chris’s knife and Chris pulling bits of plastic out from the weed hatch side while First Mate held the centre rope to stop the boat drifting away. Finally, an hour later perhaps, to huge relief, the prop was clear and could turn again. I gave Chris the only beers we had on board and he gave me his knife for which he refused to take any payment. We bagged up the bits of plastic into two big carrier bags full which Chris offered to take home to his bin and I started the engine and cruised slowly onwards, waving goodbye.

What lovely people in Rochdale. May many good things come to you, especially Chris and Saj and the women using their own initiative to go clearing litter and the man offering the friendly welcome and assistance, but not to those youths hurtling noisily up and down the towpath on motorbikes nor to the woman who thinks that feeding the ducks means dropping a carrier bag of bread into the water from a bridge as she walks past. You'd better watch out for me clog.

'Ah'm ready to fling me clog' is carved into the stone work underneath bridge 59a.

Rochdale Canal near Walsden

2015-04-19T17:34:00.001+01:00

As the Rochdale Canal ascends the Pennines, the valley opens out, the waterway widens and spots like this near Walsden are my idea of a perfect mooring, especially when the sun shines. No longer am I moored in pleasant but urban surrounds of Hebden Bridge in the shade of valley sides. Here I'm up near the 'tops', the moorland hills in their brown winter raiment, few other boats around. Peace. At least it was quiet by the time I'd moored. Before that, motocross bikes were screaming up and down the steep hillside opposite making a racket.

After a pleasant winter in and near the womb-yoga classes, organic fair-trade shops and splendid old Picture House of Hebden Bridge, where there have been some convenient waterways stoppages to give me the excuse for not moving on too far, I'm now cruising continuously as I should.

The Rochdale Canal is only 32 miles long, the first transPennine route of three, that opened in 1804. It's called the Rochdale Canal as the main investors came from this historic cotton weaving town where the co-operative movement was born and which was once the world's leading supplier of flannel. Now Rochdale suffers from more negative associations - rampant child abuse and other stories - and the canal that passes through it might be better loved were it called the Hebble Canal. Had the investors at the 'Hebble End' of the canal, near Hebden Bridge, had more influence that might be its more charming name today. But what's in a name?

2015-03-04T10:51:00.000+00:00

The Ordnance Survey map square with the most public rights of way in Britain is, so I've been told, the one that contains the town of Hebden Bridge. Look at the map with all the footpaths and bridleways highlighted and it is a seething mass of spaghetti. My notion that this area is good for walking was confirmed by a rights of way officer from Bradford council who told me this fact.

I've not walked over the moors since Christmas, only on tracks and bridleways and the towpath. The moor tops of tussock grass and clouds, with no trees, can seem bleak and, worse of all, sopping wet. Sloshing through ankle-deep peaty water, squelching through moss sponges, sinking almost to my knees. The paths disappear at times, through the dead heather but the sense of isolation, alone on the top, all brown and wide, stretching for miles with no view of a road or house, is calming, until a partridge - I think - suddenly barks like a dog and flaps from cover in front of me. I rest for a while on a turf-covered stone shelter, that I realise must be a hide for hunters, keen to shoot these birds bred for the bullet. You wouldn't know how far or near civilisation is from these heather and tussock grass shooting ranges. The hills are long and low with brows that never seem to end, so that you don't know if you're about to start descending into a valley of villages or not. If the clouds close in or dark falls, I imagine it is easy to get disoriented and lost.

The picture is not of the moor tops but a wooded valley - one of many - with a paved bridleway zigzagging through it.

2015-03-04T10:45:00.001+00:00

Mucking in

2015-01-23T21:22:00.000+00:00

"If you stand in the canal, you have to wear a hard-hat," explains Paul from the Canal & River Trust who is overseeing some restoration work that has just started on the Rochdale Canal in Hebden Bridge. It seems a bit odd as there is no danger of anything falling on your head but, there you go, I've often wondered what I'd look like as a member of Village People. 'Health and safety' regulations are justifiably maligned at times . Obviously we don't want accidents happening while working on the canal and there has to be some care taken especially with volunteers unused to such work but, if some item of safety gear is to be worn it might be more sensible to stipulate steel-capped boots. The more obvious danger comes from huge pieces of stone falling out of the canal wall onto our feet as we clear away the mud and loose walling.

The 200-year old wall has been collapsing into the cut and so the pound has been drained, volunteers recruited, a little kitchen/toilet block installed in a nearby car park and aggregate, cement, slabbing boards and various construction materials, tools and safety devices delivered. It was my first time being part of an 'official' volunteer party on the canals.

There were about ten of us total, about six volunteers. The day was cold, snow still on the ground, but we soon warmed up clearing earth from the top of the wall and then standing in the canal, clearing away some of the silt and lifting up some of the fallen blocks - those that we could manage. What the original navvies who dug 'the cut' by hand would have thought of us - four or five men more used to office work, dressed in high-viz gilets and hard-hats as we debated technique and struggled, unsuccessfully, to drag a block out of the mud using a rope, I don't know. I thought I could hear their ghosts laugh as they wondered why we couldn't just lift it between two of us.

It turns out, that the navvies built the original wall on top of wooden pilings, revealed now the water has drained away. These pilings are now rotting and so the wall juts out unsupported for much of its length, hence the collapse. The navvies also lined the canal with 'puddling' clay which we must try not to remove with our spades or it may start to leak. They had a unique method of firming the clay into place - they would herd a flock of sheep or herd of cows along the canal. Their feet would pummel the clay making it adhere to the soil, so, technically, I guess their labour wasn't just manpower or 'by hand'. Perhaps that's what we lacked - some livestock - a helpful donkey or bull to drag the block out?

If you would like to join in the restoration work - learning dry stone walling and more - you can find our more here.