Tag: peace

Why am I so excited about new canal books?

This week I received.a package in the post. It contained not a Christmas present, but four books with maps and routes of the canal network in the UK.

Narrowboaters have many options for navigating these days. We use a website called CanalPlan AC and an app called OpenCanalMap. But most boaters also like to read the guides. Some use the ones from Pearsons, but we prefer the originals – the Nicholsons. They have good maps of the routes, helpful lists of pubs and places to visit, and honest descriptions of the towns and villages on the route.

I also have a personal connection to the Nicholsons because one of my friends is the main author, Jonathan Mosse. I met him about ten years ago at a barbecue for narrowboaters in Scotland. He lent us a long chain for an anchor when we travelled the tidal river Clyde. And since we have been in England we have used our Nicholsons to navigate the huge network of rivers ad canals across the country.

Once a year I let Jonathan know all the changes and edits we have found in the books. Perhaps a pub has closed. Perhaps a bridge is incorrectly numbered. Perhaps we have discovered a wonderful new cafê. In return he sometimes sends me new editions, and that was what I received this week. In fact, guides 2 and 3 have not even been published yet. They come out in February but Jonathan has got me early copies.

We have been living in bricks and mortar houses since October, albeit with six weeks in the Outer Hebrides. I am itching to be back on Narrowboat Thuis. We won’t get properly going till March but perhaps we can get a week or two on the boat while it is moored in the Marina. Maybe New Year in our Narrowboat, with me, Mandy, the dogs and reading my new books. Sounds good to me.

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Can you have a community when houses are miles apart?

We felt very lucky this week to be invited to join the local people at a bonfire night celebration.

North Uist is a sparsely populated island, and the cottage we are staying in is in one of the remotest areas – Balranald. It has a church, a few houses, quite a few cows and a bird sanctuary. In the summer it has a campsite that looks as if it would be pretty busy but at this time of year that is closed and there is no one here.

That suits us very well. Whether on Narrowboat Thuis, or at home, we are comfortable with our own company and have had a very relaxing time here. The nearest proper village is Bhaigh (Bayhead) which is four miles away. It has about 40 houses and a shop. It also has the High School for North Uist, and every day about twenty minibuses carry the children to school from all around the island.

On bonfire night they bring together the local community to eat burgers, drink Irn Bru and watch fireworks. It was a great night. Not the most impressive display I have ever seen but still a very good one, complemented by the bonfire, the full moon, and the reflections in the sea. But what really made it was a couple of hundred people from toddlers to ancients gathered to enjoy it together.

The Hebridean accent is probably the softest of all the Scottish areas and I could hear it in the excitement of the little ones, the bickering of the teens, and the conversations between farmers and other locals. They had all arrived in their pickup trucks from miles around to be together.

One thing that did amuse me was hearing a father telling his child how good it was to celebrate the foiling of a Catholic plot, five hundred years later. Until the five mile causeway was built between the islands in 1960, there was very little mixing between Catholic South Uist and Protestant North Uist. I guess some views remain pretty embedded.

It was a lovely evening and it was good to be able to join such a distant but close community. Thank you.

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No more narrowboating this year – so what is next?

Narrowboat Thuis is back at the marina in Stone for the winter and we are back in our house in Lancashire. As always, we are a little sad at the end of this year’s adventure, but we will be back on “the cut” next year, and can look forward to the next few months of bricks & mortar life.

And I can engage in my favourite pastime of making plans. I get bored very easily and the idea of a quiet retirement fills me with dread. So we will have a couple of weeks at home, seeing family and friends and doing jobs around the house, and then we will be off to North Uist for six weeks.

North Uist is a small island in the Outer Hebrides. We have stayed there before and it will be very peaceful at this time of year. The tourists will have left and restaurants & attractions will have closed. But what will be left for the locals is simply stunning scenery and amazing nature. The weather will either be sideways rain, in which case our cottage with the open fire will be very welcome, or it will be clear and sunny with the best light in the UK. My brother in law is joining us for the first week and he is unconvinced. I can’t wait to take him to see some of the beaches and see what he says.

After the Hebridean trip it will be Christmas and maybe skiing in January. And then, all too soon, it will be February and we will be back on the boat. Come the end of this year I will have been retired for five years. Is it time to go back to a job? Not yet!

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It’s autumn on the Shropshire Union

It really feels that as we have entered September, we have entered autumn. I am waking up in the dark for the first time since March. It rains every day. I am wearing a top as well as a t shirt. I have even started wearing jeans instead of shorts.

So what is good about narrowboating in autumn?

Well one thing is the light. The sunrises and sunsets are just so beautiful. We are currently traveling in the middle of the Shropshire countryside and I look forward to walking the dogs each morning.

Another thing I love is my fellow boaters on the canal. I enjoy boating with the novices during the summer. But it is great at this time of year when my fellow boaters have a little more experience and knowledge. I spent an evening in a proper boaters pub yesterday, geeking out about the life with people who have lived on board since childhood.

And finally, best of all in autumn the insects start to die off. The sunny days have been nice this summer, but the horse flies and wasps less so. I have a boat full of spiders, which helps, but a few frosts will help even more.

But as we head towards winter, there is one thing I am not looking forward to, and that is muddy towpaths. Narrowboats are easy to clean, because they are small, but it is an uphill battle when the dogs bring in their dirty footprints every time they go out.

So what is in like in the “real” world? Are you enjoying autumn too, or missing the sun?

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Is narrowboat life tiring?

A lot of people ask us if it is boring to live on a narrowboat. I think they assume that when we are moving so slowly we don’t have to concentrate. And when we are moored, there is nothing to do. So how come we are all feeling tired this week?

I think there are three reasons. Firstly when you drive a narrowboat, even at 3mph, you have to concentrate the whole time. The boats seem to have a mind of their own and after few seconds lacking attention you can be pointing at the canal bank, another boat or more likely a bridge. I love it because you also see wonderful nature and industrial heritage, and every day is different. But all that fresh air can be tiring.

Secondly there is always something to do when we moor up. Perhaps it is fixing something, doing general maintenance, or the day to day tasks of shopping, filling up with water, greasing the stern gland. There is also plenty of time to read, watch TV or even write a blog, but it can be tiring.

Finally this year there is always the nagging concern about canal closures. More than half the network is closed now due to low water levels, and even though we have chosen a route for our final trip of the year that navigates the most reliably wet canals, rumours abound amongst the boating community that where we are now may also suffer. We really don’t want to find ourselves isolated, miles away from our home marina.

So yes, narrowboating can be tiring. But it is a good tiring and one where I fall asleep each night, looking forward to the next day.

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Where shall we go for our last boat trip of the year?

We are back on Narrowboat Thuis for the next five or six weeks. It will be our last trip of the year so we need to decide where to go. Normally there would be a great deal of choice with thousands of miles of interconnecting canals and rivers. But this year the water levels are so low that many canals are now closed, and the Canal & River Trust have warned us that worse is to come.

There seems to be only one route where we can be sure of water – across the Staffordshire & Worcester to Autherley Junction, north on the Shropshire Union and then west on the Llangollen and maybe north to Chester. The “Shroppie” and Lllangollen in particular are used to carry water for people so will not be allowed to drain out. We can hope for rain to open other canals, but the reality is that we will need to wait for a wet winter to fill the reservoirs and canals back to normal.

The downside of this journey is that we have done it many times before. The upside is that there is a reason we have done it so many times – because we love it. We are hoping for stunning sunsets, peaceful moorings, places to visit, maybe even a couple of canal side pubs!

Stay tuned to find out how the trip goes.

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Why would a village be proud of being “boater hostile”?

Earlier this week we travelled on the North Oxford canal through a village called Ansty in Warwickshire. I was ready to moor up for the day so was looking for a nice stretch of armco to tie up to, with good views. Unfortunately though the whole village there were “no mooring” signs every few metres along the canal.

This is very unusual. We boaters have many rights from hundreds of years of boating and one of them is a right to moor on the towpath side of almost every canal. Sometimes there are short term moorings in the centre of towns where you can just stay for a couple of days. Sometimes there are long term moorings where boaters pay to moor permanently. But mostly you can stay pretty much anywhere for up to 14 days.

So why is Ansty to anti boat? Their Parish Council website front page claims that the village is the most boater hostile on the network but does not explain why.

All I can think is that the canal goes through the village on an embankment and so boaters can see into the upstairs bedrooms of the nearby houses. But that is true in many many parts of the canal network and besides the canal would have been there two hundred years before these houses were built so why not just use curtains? Besides which, we boaters get very used to gongoozlers peering through our windows.

We are very privileged being allowed to moor in the most beautiful parts of the UK so I am not complaining too much, but I won’t be visiting Ansty again any time soon.

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A tree is down across the canal. What should we do?

We are back on Narrowboat Thuis this week. We have missed boating these past few weeks. Our son Rob and fiancée Alessa borrowed the boat last week and took it half way round the Four Counties Ring. They took good care of it and finished at Market Drayton. So with some shuffling of cars, we met them there and are now cruising back to the marina in Stone. We need to be back for next Thursday which should have given us plenty of time, but on a Narrowboat, nothing is predictable, and on the first afternoon we saw a warning from Canal and River Trust (CRT) that the canal was closed ahead of us due to a fallen tree.

It was not just any fallen tree. The CRT team had visited it and decided their chainsaws and equipment were not hefty enough for the task. A specialist contractor would be required and that could take a while.

There is no point getting stressed living on a boat, so we moored up by a good pub and prepared to wait it out.

But then we saw a boat coming towards us from the direction of the stoppage and they explained that in fact the tree had fallen in such a way that there was room for a Narrowboat to pass underneath. It might not meet the CRT Health and Safety guidelines but it seemed fine to us, so we set off again and passed happily under the heavy tree before the pesky contractors arrived to close it down.

Life on a Narrowboat is full of adventures. They may not be world changing but each day has surprises and problems to solve. Sometimes it is a physically tiring life, being outside and moving heavy locks. But always it is a mentally tiring life, despite being the coolest most chilled thing we have ever done.

We are glad to be back.

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Nottingham in a Narrowboat

We have travelled most of the UK canal and river network over the past five years. There are a few loose ends and this week we ticked off another of them – Nottingham. Within a few miles this used to be a real hub for water transport. There is the wide river Trent, there used to be a Nottingham canal through the town centre and a Beeston canal past the massive Boots works. Nowadays these are merged into the Nottingham and Beeston. In addition there is the Erewash canal, the river Soar and the start of the Trent & Mersey canal. Two further canals, the Derby and the Grantham have not been navigable for many years.

These days the waterways here are no longer used for industry. There are just leisure boaters like ourselves. A wide variety of people on the cut. Around Nottingham town centre there are homeless people living in tents, and wealthy owners of gin palace yachts. Some of the canal is run down and a bit rough. Other areas have been fully gentrified and look beautiful and expensive.

We are currently moored by the steps outside County Hall, a massive piece of architecture from the early 20th Century. Rowers from the nearby National Water Centre glide past us with their coaches shouting at them from the riverside. Swans and geese keep us company. We are overlooked by Trent Bridge Cricket Ground. It all feels very different than the run down industry that dominated the local canals here a few decades ago.

I am glad we have visited Nottingham. I’m off out now to see the museums to see if I can discover more. Every day is a school day.

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When do ducklings arrive on the canal?

Our TV on the narrowboat uses old photographs as a screen saver. It shows photos from similar dates in previous years. For two weeks I have been looking at ducklings, goslings and signets. But this year we have seen nothing – till yesterday.

First we saw a new family of red headed ducks. I didn’t get a picture sadly. And then we passed three individual ducklings, including this one. Based on previous years I now expect to see more and more over the next few weeks.

So I have two questions. 1. Why do ducklings all arrive at once? 2. Why are they later this year when the weather is really warm this year?

I am guessing the answer to the first is that being born in Spring gives them the best chance of survival. It is late enough to avoid the worst cold weather, and early enough to keep numbers of predators low. The second is more tricky. Mallards have a 28 day incubation period, so perhaps the current warm weather is irrelevant. The blog I wrote a month ago was entitled “Is it too cold to live on a narrowboat?”. So did the ducks just wait another week to incubate their eggs?

Things that make you say “hmmm”.

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