Contents
Overview below, selected detail first right.

Frequently Asked Questions

One Afternoon
Taster Trips
Oxford Ring

Long Weekend
East London Ring
Droitwich Ring

One Week
Caldon Canal
Llangollen and Montgomery Canals
London Ring
Lancaster Canal
Lee and Stort Navigations
Birmingham Ring
Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal
Black Country Ring
Wey Navigation

Two Weeks
Avon Ring
Cheshire Ring
Leicester Ring
South Pennine Ring
Stourport Ring
Kennet & Avon canal
Warwickshire ring

More Time
Four Counties Ring
Thames Ring
The Fens
Two Roses Ring

The Broads

Scotland
Caledonian Canal and the Great Glen
Forth and Clyde and Union Canals

Regional Maps
Complete coverage of the waterway system on a national map

Further Information
Complete hirebase listing, the Seven Wonders, top waterway features, Index of Waterways.

Frequently Asked Questions
Conversations alongside water often include queries about the boat itself, the holiday, the where, when and how of boating. Part of the pleasure of being on the water is the people you meet and the openness amongst everybody involved. Most people manage a greeting or a wave, even if only from afar.
Questions raised below are typical of those asked by passers by, the gongoozlers, but with some sometimes asked by ‘rookie’ hirers added. A few, essentially technical queries, are at the end.

General
Where can we visit?
What can we see?

Getting afloat:
What type of holiday would you like?
Why go by water?
How fast?
What else can we plan to do as well?
Can we get lost?
How long away?
What should we take with us?
Cruising rings and other things
How soon can we start?

Technical
Do I need a licence?
What is a flight of locks?
Who operates the locks?
Can everybody do everything?
What is a winding hole?
Do you tie up or moor?
Why are engines stronger than the speed limit allows?
How do you tackle overtaking?
Should I buy a boat?
How much?
What is a ‘gongoozler’ anyway?
What if the book does not answer my waterway queries?

Ways of Using this Book

Ways of using this book

We hope that this book will help to answer some of the queries that occur when you are first inclined to take to the water. The best way the book can help depends on ‘where you are coming from’.

How long have you got?
The first five chapters of the book are related to the time you have available for your holiday, ranging from an afternoon to any time in excess of two weeks.

Do you want to start close to home?
Maps in the book cover most of the country. Hirebases are shown alongside the waterways. Seek out somewhere close to your home town.

Where do you want to visit?
Each suggested route includes visitor attractions to be found along the way. Most of them are within a half hour walk of the water, with a few beyond that distance indicated as ‘longer walks’.
This is clearly a personal selection and is only scratching the surface of places that could be visited within a short walk of a waterway.

Do you seek the ‘Seven Wonders’?
Roberts Aickman of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) described what he considered the ‘Seven Wonders’ of the waterways. These are located on the KEY MAP.

What is the name of your chosen waterway?
Individual canal companies had fiercely individual characters; they were never really team players. The names as given to waterways by their original owners are often still in use today and there is an index of the waterways featured in this book on page 80.

Are you meeting friends for your holiday?
A railway station that serves a large number of towns will be the most convenient target for a group of friend converging from around the country. Some might be sufficiently close to a hirebase to influence you choice of starting point.

FAQs
Overview below, selected detail right.

Frequently Asked Questions

General Where can we visit? What can we see? Getting afloat What type of holiday would you like? Why go by water? How fast? What else can we plan to do as well? Can we get lost? How long away? What should we take with us? Cruising rings and other things How soon can we start? Technical Do I need a licence? What is a flight of locks? Who operates the locks? Can everybody do everything? What is a winding hole? Do you tie up or moor? Why are engines stronger than the speed limit allows? How do you tackle overtaking? Should I buy a boat? How much? What is a ‘gongoozler’ anyway? What if the book does not answer my waterway queries?

General

Where can we visit?
Anywhere within a short walk of the towpath.
There are thousands of visitor attractions on or near the 3000 miles of canals and rivers, only some of which can be featured within the pages of this book. Many places within a half hour walk of the towpath have been suggested. There are others beyond that limit which can be reached if you decide to tie up for a day or where you all pile into a taxi or use a local tram for a short diversion ‘on the bank’. A few are noted.
After all, the boat has ‘en-suite hotel rooms’ and can be a base for your visits.

What can we see?
Towpath hedges are refuge for wild flowers and harbour wildlife - heron, voles, kingfishers and swans can all be seen by the sharp-eyed. Rivers and canals pass through huge swathes of countryside and offer visits through and near many National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Roman towns such as London, Lincoln, Bath, York and Chester, seats of learning such as Oxford and Cambridge, theatrical centres such as Stratford and Llangollen are all served by waterways.

The canal network helped cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham and the Potteries to grow during our Industrial Revolution and they are full of industrial archaeology - both on their original sites and in living museums. Their canals have survived for over 200 years - you can still get alongside by water.

The waterway system itself is a historical record, made before diesel power and dumper trucks, before electricity and computers, before total stations and contour mapping. The historical record includes pioneering feats of engineering, designs that would be triple checked today, but in those times were based on field experiments, faith in people and experience of mines. Construction contracts involved more men than were mobilized for war, thousands of bridges and cuttings, huge, sometimes leaking, embankments that drove men to their beds with worry. Tunnels bigger than any coal shaft before them, aqueducts carrying bigger loads than anything the Romans built for us.

Places like Little Venice, Wigan Pier, Castlefield, and structures such as the Anderton lift , Foxton inclined plane, Pontcysyllte aqueduct and Standedge tunnel are there to see on the waterways themselves. They can be visited by boat or by road. All can be found on one or more of the maps on the following pages - with short descriptions alongside.

Getting afloat:

What type of holiday would you like?
Luxury of a hotel
There is an increasing number of hotel boats with the luxury of individual cabins, many with en-suite facilities, cuisine of high standard and where everything to do with travelling is done for you (although if you do feel like helping you are welcome). The timetable is given in advance and you join the boat at one place on one weekend and leave it from somewhere else entirely different.

Self drive
Hire boats you work yourself, with the help of your crew. You have to make some choices before you start, and this anticipation can be half the fun!
Canoeing

Simplest way to get on water but not designed for long distances unless you are a specialist. Devizes to Westminster is 125 miles and 77 locks.

Camping skiff
Victorians favoured this adventure. Jerome K Jerome was one of ‘Three Men in a Boat’ - not forgetting the dog. A skiff was hired and propelled down river, nights being on the skiff under the stars with a canvas roof pulled over some hoops. The skiffs were returned up river by the company - by road. It can still be done.

Volunteer
Many canals we use today would not have been ‘saved’ except for the summer gatherings of able bodied volunteers who undertake restoration work.

Skills are taught, people are introduced, evening relaxation is part of the deal and the authorities are impressed.

Why go by water?
‘There is nothing- absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats’. So said Mole in ‘Wind in the Willows’ and it is difficult to disagree. Progress along water is steady, a rate dictated by the nature of water. It is a different world and wraps its inhabitants in different priorities. Away from the frenetic everyday world your whole body adjusts to a more natural rythmn, so much so you often cannot remember what day of the week it is! Some suggest it is ‘the fastest way of slowing down’.

How fast?
Your rate of progress as seen by anyone following in a car is VERY slow. But there should be no reason to rush. You are on holiday and at locks it might be necessary to wait your turn anyway. The joy is the smooth glide along the water, not the achievement of rat-race targets. Ultimately your rate of progress depends on how many hours of movement you want to put into the day. After a typical ‘holiday start’ of say 10am, a two hour break for lunch, perhaps a short walk into town - 4 hours per day of actual travelling may be all that is left!

What else can we plan to do as well?
Allow time to do ‘off-cut’ activities.
Visit a theme park or your maiden aunt, perhaps see a film. Foraging for provisions among the small specialist butchers, bakers and greengrocers of an unfamiliar town, such as Marple, can be an adventure in itself but also requires time. So does window shopping or buying major souvenirs of the trip eg antique furniture or modern pottery! But you may not want to plan at all - you are on holiday.

Can we get lost?
Yes, in the sense of being well removed from familiar landmarks and beginning to learn new place names in a new landscape.

But in the sense that you don’t know your way home - no, you won’t be lost!
There are so few ways a boat can go across the country that there are very few junctions involved in the twists and turns of traversing the land. The routes within this book are described using junction names. They are often gloriously memorable.

How long away?
The waterway system today offers a wide choice to the recreational boater - from short breaks mid-week or a long weekend, to two and three week cruises or even longer. Some hire companies can even arrange for one-way trips between two cooperating bases.

What should we take with us?
Holiday reading, maps, canal and local guide books, pets, camera, binoculars, bird recognition book, some board games for the evenings, two packs of cards (we play canasta), a torch to see your way back from the hostelry, mobile phone and camcorders! Just remember the cords to a cigarette lighter for your source of 12V re-charge.

Cruising rings and other things
There are two very fundamental cruising alternatives - a ‘ring’ or ‘out and return’.

‘Out and return’ makes it easy to concentrate on an area of waterway but always with a choice of being tempted to stop longer, add a detour or deviate from the original ideas. But for some this is a little too hazy. They like to know something of where they will be, for instance so they can arrange for friends to visit. So anticipating the details before you start can be part of the fun.

Decisions, decisions - even on rings. The book assumes you travel clockwise, but one choice may be, at least among the left-handed amongst us, to travel anticlockwise.

Even an ‘out and return’ journey has the choice of whether to turn left or turn right when leaving the hirebase! You can, of course, plan to do a little of both, which involves returning past the hirebase the day before you are due back and making a short exploration in the ‘other’ direction. The joy of such a plan is that if you dawdle too much on the main leg you can leave the ‘other’ direction for another time.

If you like to plan ahead it is useful to have a ‘Plan A’ and a ‘Plan B’ for each decision you may take.

The world of waterways does not attempt to offer airline timetable reliability. So you need to make an extra allowance of time for possible changes due to circumstances beyond your control eg closed locks, queues, adverse river flows, the weather forecast.

Easiest of all plans might be called ‘Plan C’ - just journey along the waterway for roughly half the allotted time, turn round and return - nice and simple - a bit of an adventure as you only discover where you arrive on a ‘day-by-day’ basis - a distance dependent solely on conditions as found at the time.
If you stagger the start of the return journey by half a day or so then all the lunch and night stops will be in different places to those on the way out.

How soon can we start?
Hiring normally starts after noon as the boat will have come back that morning and it will have been prepared for you in the meantime.
Your party will need to settle in, you will be shown all the facilities on board - central heating, engine, flush toilet, bathroom, kitchen - and any novices will learn the basics of ‘driving’ the boat. Your questions will be answered.
Allow for a first cup of tea and you might plan up to two hours travelling on the first day before mooring for the night - alongside a nearby waterside hostelry perhaps - ask the hirebase staff.

Technical

Do I need a licence?
You do not need a special licence to drive a boat. The hirebase will ‘show you the ropes’ before you set off and slow progress in an all steel vehicle means there is little damage you can do to the boat itslf, although paint can be vulnerable.

Some firms run ‘Trial days’ where you can spend an afternoon getting advice and a little practice. There is usually a fee, but this is knocked off the cost of boat hire if you make a holiday booking.

What is a flight of locks?
A bit like a flight of stairs which has a series of steps one after another, a flight of locks has a series of locks one after another. Staircase locks, however, are a bit more complicated. Essentially staircase locks are so close together that the top gates of one are the same piece of wood as the bottom gates of the next.

Who operates the locks?
On Rivers such as the Severn and the Thames it is done for you! On canals it is a case of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ with waterways staff assisting at major flights of locks. D-I-Y lock operation is easily accomplished by any semi-fit person. Youngsters soon get the idea and have been known to take over and do all the work themselves.

Can everybody do everything?
Yes, then everybody gets to know what is involved in steering, working locks, cooking (!) etc. and it’s more fun too. Some experienced crews get to specialise, but that comes later.

What is a winding hole?
It is a wider piece of canal where boats can perform the equivalent of a three point turn in order to go back the way they came. An indentation in the bank allows the bows of a narrowboat to be held whilst the prevailing wind blows the boat round. Hence the unusual pronunciation - ‘winding hole’.

Do you tie up or moor?
Both. This book uses ‘tie up’ to indicate a temporary stop and ‘mooring’ for longer - eg overnight. In popular places, share a mooring ring with the boat in front, and allow the boat behind to share yours. This way the length of bank is fully used. If the bank is completely full, and you don’t want to move on, ask one of the moored boats to allow your boat alongside and tie your rope direct to the rings on the bank , not ideal but it may only be for one night… if there is a charge you could share the cost!

When moored, experienced boaters often add ‘springer ropes’ - additional longer ropes to create a firm triangle which can stop the boat riding fore and aft when other boats pass - especially on busy narrow canals. On rivers all ropes have to be a little slack as there is a chance that levels may change overnight.

Why are engines stronger than the speed limit allows?
Boats use both canal waters and the waters of rivers. Speed limit for canals is 4 mph and on rivers it is often the same. However, water in rivers can flow downstream at a cracking pace, often faster than 4 mph. A boat pushing upstream at 4 mph against this moving water would appear to remain stationary and not move, except perhaps backwards!

Therefore boat engines are strong and are capable of propelling along the still waters of canals much faster than the speed limit. This is designed for safety on rivers, not an invitation to break the speed limit on canals, imposed because a heavy wash behind a speeding boat can damage 200 year old canal banks and can lead to leaks - which are not appreciated by the neighbours!

How do you tackle overtaking?
Generally, you don’t. Canals are too narrow, another boat may be coming the other way, emerging from around the next corner or through the next bridge-hole. If you are content to be slower than average and you accumulate 3 or 4 boats in a queue behind, just kill your speed, pull over to the towpath, tie up for 5 minutes, let them pass and you will soon have the joy of independence again.

If it is busy and there are locks ahead you may, of course, choose to keep your place in the queue.

Should I buy a boat?
Maybe, eventually! Customers of boat-builders generally have already hired two or more boats before they place their orders, partly to test different saloon / bedroom arrangements, partly to test the differences between canal and river conditions.

In many ways hiring is better than owning. Owners have to start each trip from exactly the place they finished their last one. Hirers have the option of starting each trip from points that are dozens, even hundreds, of miles apart.

How much?
Boats are expensive to buy - they are generally the cost of two BMWs. Hiring prices, on the basis of per person per day for up to six on a boat, depend on the standard of the boat (some are of extremely high quality), whether you are going in high or low season, whether it is for a short break or longer.

A week’s holiday in July 2001 varied between £10 and £30 per person per night.

What is a ‘gongoozler’?
The boaters affectionate name for the walkers and onlookers who often crowd together along the towpaths to follow, sometimes critically, the progress of boats, especially as they pass through the locks.

What if the book does not answer my waterway queries?
Look up on our message board. On this website. If previous visitors found the same, there maybe an answer already posted, if not ADD YOUR OWN. Brian will try to answer any waterway query, and if he can’t he will find a man who can. Leave your e-mail address for parallel direct reply.