THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509050181
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: Long : 393 lines
IN VERY UN-ENGLISH weather - warm sun and cloudless skies - I have been enjoying a very typical, very uncomplicated English holiday break - that is, the way the English do it: strike out for the country, away from the crowds, find an idyllic spot, then park beside the road, unfold some chairs and . . . sit, read, brew a cup of tea, maybe nap, relax, enjoy.
In all directions stretches rolling farmland with grazing sheep and dairy herds, bisected by hedgerows and bordered by clumps of broadleaf woods.
Here and there are ancient half-timbered farmhouses and modern hay barns, narrow brick-and-stone humpback bridges of uncertain age and, just where they are needed, delightful pubs.
One difference, though: we're doing the countryside by canal boat.
Christopher Cliff of Middlewich Narrowboats had enticed me last winter with his interesting brochure on canal touring.
Now here I was aboard one of his unique vessels. Chris had given me an hour of ``tuition'' - their way of saying ``instruction'' on how to handle and care for the NB Holly - then shepherded me and my companion through three of the four locks we would encounter on this stretch of the Trent & Mersey Canal and sent us on our way.
Alone. Self-drive.
Well, how difficult can this be, anyway?
I'll tell you. Mostly, it is a piece of cake. At least on this quiet stretch of slackwater canal. Even for novices like us.
I mean, it IS a canal. Canals have, well,
boundaries, defined by stone bulkheads. This one is generally about 20 feet wide. Like a highway with straight stretches and curves and underpasses. It's not like we're going to stray off course and end up in Sumatra or some place like that. And it's shallow and sort of saucer-shaped in profile, probably averaging five feet deep in the center, less than that at the sides. No danger of sinking.
Holly's hull is quarter-inch steel. Chris said he didn't think I could do it much damage.
Top speed is 4 miles an hour - that helps protect the canals from splashing wakes and greatly reduces the chances of major damage in a collision - although I can't remember a time the last couple of days when I've given it full throttle.
Slow and easy is the way of the narrowboater. Joggers and cyclists on the towpath have been zipping past us with regularity. Even a conservation officer strolling along in search of a family of swans.
Yes, mostly a piece of cake.
Have you enjoyed your holiday?'' a passing boater asks.
He owns his own narrowboat. I can tell at a glance by the decoration and lettering on the sides. He is a ``regular.'' He also knows, for the same reasons, we've just rented NB Holly and very possibly are first-timers.
``I congratulate you on your choice of boats,'' he goes on. I think your boat - well, it and Willow (another from Chris Cliff's Middlewich fleet) - are two of the finest on the canals.''
Well, now, that's a nice thing to say. Even if it's not quite true.
The choice had been Chris', actually. He had told me he thought I'd appreciate the ``traditional'' style boat. What I also appreciate is that Holly, something less than seven feet wide (the width of the locks), is ``only'' 47 feet long. Something a novice can handle, marginally more maneuverable than those that extend up to 70 feet.
It's like a mobile home on water. We Americans would probably call it a houseboat. They are NEVER called barges.
In some of the bigger ones that, to me, resemble floating railroad passenger cars, there are sleeping berths for up to 12 (Holly sleeps four in comfort, six if need be); all have cooking and bathing facilities.
Chris' ``traditional'' boats have boatman's back cabins, authentic replicas of the living accommodations of the old working crafts. In these tiny, cramped quarters not as big as a hallway in a modern home, the canal boat people managed to live and raise families.
Peaceful, isn't it?'' a canalside fisherman said to me. ``Everybody else is going full speed ahead.''
Yes, it has been peaceful.
I think back to that first night, moored just below the Big Lock pub. Being near the pub had been our excuse to stop, maybe get a bite of dinner. Fact is, we felt a bit harried after going through four locks in quick succession - even with Chris' help on the first three.
That night, trying to get to sleep, I begin to hear strange sounds. First it sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. Then rain striking the roof. I have visions of us slipping our moorings in the night and drifting off to . .
Finally I realize the sound is the steel hull scraping gently against a rather sandy bottom. Another thing I discover: When moored, you can tell when another boat is approaching, sometimes before seeing it.
Moored next evening beside Marbury Country Park, we begin to experience what canal boating was all about. In the distance I can make out the shape of Great Budsworth Church, the English country parish church, standing resolute in dark red Cheshire stone. Elsewhere, farmsteads.
Red clover and some sort of purple flowers adorn our spot along the towpath. Geese honk as they fly overhead. I wonder if they honk all the while they are flying. I think so. But don't they get tired? Wouldn't it be like jogging and carrying on a conversation at the same time?
The sky, clear blue last time I looked, has now darkened and is criss-crossed with jet contrails that glow pink in the setting sun. It has become an abstract painting.
Doves perched on fenceposts across the canal begin an incessant coo-cooo-cooo, coo-coo. The milking herd joins what I suppose could be called a cacophony, but in the country it's more like a symphony.
Cows really make a lot of noise in the evenings, what with milking and feeding and all that. Every cow seems to have something to say about it. In slightly different voices, with slightly different inflections. It's just amazing how many different ways there are to say ``Moo.'' If you live on a farm, you know that, of course. If you moor next to a dairy farm, you will learn.
There was an overnight stop beside Bostock Green, an expanse of farmland where the little river Dane meanders through soft soil, cutting deep banks shadowed by alder and willow. Next morning I pick enough blackberries for breakfast from among the vines that entwined the towpath hedgerow.
Peaceful, indeed.
But that was then. Just now the peace has been shattered by what lies ahead.
I am gripped by the clammy hand of sheer terror. There is a chill on the back of my neck, the tightness of a twisted rope in the pit of my stomach. My throat is dry. I am sweating. I have to go to the bathroom.
After a couple of rather tight turns that I managed to negotiate reasonably well, there, just ahead, outlined in a bulwark of white brick, is the dusky, half-moon mortal of the Barnton Tunnel.
I haven't got much time to talk, but let me try to explain our situation.
Remember what I said about this narrowboat. It is narrow. And long. Designed for this canal. But the tunnel is only marginally wider. This is going to be like threading a needle.
I am steering from the stern with my left hand on the tiller, my right hand near the simple, near-idiot-proof, single-lever engine controls.
Maybe you'll understand better if you do this: place a pencil on a flat surface. With your thumb and index finger gently on the eraser - don't grip it, just control it - push the pencil along slowly. Got the hang of that? Now make some turns. Not like a car, is it?
Suppose that pencil weighs about 30 tons and you're trying to steer it through a large drinking straw.
It is like driving a log.
Now you're with me.
So here we go. I can't back out now. Literally, for there is no place wide enough to turn around. And figuratively. I simply have to do the Barnton Tunnel. It's one of the landmarks of the Trent & Mersey.
I give a long blast on the klaxon. AAAH-UUUGAH! That's the signal to let everyone else know we're coming through. I hope everyone else knows that.
The smokestacks - the hinged one for the engine and the lift-off one for the little coal stove in the traditional boatman stern cabin - are down. There's very little overhead clearance. I've throttled back to dead slow, and I flick on the bow spotlight, 40-some feet ahead of me, as we enter the tunnel mouth.
My companion is up there in the bow with a broom handle to help guide us through. I wonder if that will work. I doubt it.
Now I am in the tunnel, too, and . . . I CANNOT SEE A THING.
My eyes are taking forever to adjust to the enveloping darkness, and the spotlight seems to be sending out only faint circles of yellow light that dance on the blackened walls. This is worse than I had imagined.
Something else has just occurred to me.
I still do not even know for sure if another boat is coming through the tunnel toward us. I HOPE not. I PRAY not. I have not mastered reverse.
This tunnel is 572 yards long. That's longer than five football fields. From where I stand in near total darkness, it could just as well be 572 MILES long.
Worst of all, I cannot even see the light at the end of the tunnel. Damn James Brindley. The self-made engineer didn't dig this thing straight. I mean, it's crooked.
What am I saying? This claustrophobic darkness has clouded my perspective. This tunnel was dug in 1777 with picks and shovels and mules to haul away the debris, more than 200 years ago when the concept of subterranean construction was in its infancy.
As I understand it, Brindley, trained as a millwright, first undertook canal building without written calculations or drawings. The canals themselves are his only records. Remarkable, really, more than 200 years later. Well done, James Brindley.
Maybe this is a good time, here in the very heart of Brindley's works, to give you a little more background.
The Trent & Mersey Canal was the brainchild of Josiah Wedgwood, one of the most celebrated and influential pottery designers and manufacturers of all time and one of the visionary leaders of the Industrial Revolution.
Wedgwood and other pottery manufacturers of North Staffordshire desperately wanted a more reliable method of transporting raw materials - coal from, well, all around, china clay from Cornwall and flint from Sussex - to their works and the finished products to the seaports for export to growing markets in Europe and Colonial North America.
Pack horses were neither cheap nor efficient and breakage of finished pottery was high.
Wedgwood put up 1,000 pounds sterling, and he and his wealthy and influential friends engaged Brindley to survey and engineer their proposed canal. Brindley had won nationwide acclaim for his earlier (1761) work on the Duke of Bridgewater's coal-transport canal.
Trained as a millwright, Brindley had to struggle with a disbelieving Parliament before that work could be undertaken. He had to demonstrate his proposed aqueduct over the River Irwell with a model made of cheese, and he built mud pies in the House of Commons to prove the canal water wouldn't leak.
Wedgwood and his fellow promoters suggested the name ``The Canal from the Trent to the Mersey'' because, well, that's where it was to go. Brindley chose to call it the ``Grand Trunk Canal'' because of the many branch canals he saw eventually branching from the main line. Begun in 1766, it was completed in 1777. The tunnels - Barnton, the 424-yard Saltersford, the 1,239-yard (and crooked) Preston Brook and the 2,926-yard Harecastle - were the big holdups.
Once, the canals were conduits connecting the industrial heartland with seaports. But the same fierce competition for a fast, efficient means of handling cargo that gave birth to the canal system also ultimately did it in. The steam engine spawned the railroads, the internal combustion engine a proper highway system. Both, in their time, did the job better than canals. Still do.
For a long period, the canals lay derelict. Today they are largely recreational, placid streams that transport boaters through a time warp into a slower, quieter age.
The Trent & Mersey is part of a British Waterways system that today includes more than 2,000 miles of canals.
I'm told you could, with plenty of time and a bit of skill, take a boat all the way from Wales in the west or the Yorkshire moors in the north all the way to London.
At Middlewich I met Edmund Bartlett, who had cruised with his wife up from London, a distance by road of about 175 miles. That isn't so far, I suppose, the way we tend to think these days, but to a narrowboater that's light years from King's Road and the Thames. It had taken them about a year, but they had taken some breaks along the way.
The Lister engine, which chugged happily along as we glided through the sunny Cheshire countryside, has now, in this foreboding darkness, taken up a taunt, as rhythmic as my breathing is ragged. The message echoes off the tunnel arch:
You'll never get through,
You'll never get through,
You'll never, never, never
Get through.
I know that's what it is saying. And I believe it.
The arch of bricks, close overhead, is cold and damp. Somebody told me bats hang out in here. The bricks brush against my hair, now my arm. CRR-RUNCH.
We've come to a slight bend in the tunnel and I have scraped the hull, the side of the cabin and my arm against the brick. It was quite a lick, actually. I have large smudges of black soot and red brick dust on my shirt to show for it. Pretty nearly knocked me overboard, to be perfectly honest.
Damn James Brindley and his crooked tunnel.
One of the reasons there's such little clearance between boat and tunnel roof is that when these tunnels were built there was no such thing as internal combustion engines. Boats were pulled by horses or mules. There was no room for a towpath in the tunnels, so the boatmen had to ``leg'' their vessels through - that is, lie on their backs on the boat's roof and push it through with their legs.
So we don't really have it SO bad. We do have an engine, albeit a contemptuous one just now. Besides, now I can see the exit portal, a welcome half moon of light in the distance. The engine is wrong. We WILL get through.
Don't be misled by my grapple with the tunnel of terror. In the whole scheme of things it couldn't have lasted for more than - what? - an eternity? Just kidding. I can kid now. We're out of that thing, and I refuse to think, just now anyway, about the fact that I've got to turn around and go back through.
Actually, I figure it couldn't have taken more than about 20 minutes, the tunnel being about a third of a mile long and the boat moving about one mile an hour.
Maybe we'll just stay here forever, moored in the shade by the towpath in the wide, quarter-mile-long pool that separates the Barnton from the Saltersford tunnel. Just stay here forever and watch time go by. Ever so slowly.
But what would I DO? There I go again, thinking like regular people out there in the regular world. This is the world of canals. Life is slow and easy. The point is, you don't have to DO anything.
Oh, I could fish, I suppose. Lots of people do along these canals. These Brits take their fishing seriously. They come with elaborate kits - folding chairs and their gear packed in elaborate cases that resemble golf bags. They use poles made of space-age material, long ones that reach almost across the canal in places where it is narrow. And they fish this sluggish brown water with maggots.
Maggots.
One fellow showed me a bream he had just caught that fit neatly in the palm of his hand. He answered the question that must have been on my face.
``Oh, we pull a lot of big ones out of here,'' he said, holding his hands about two feet apart like fishermen always do. ``Some of 'em go about three or four pounds.''
Right.
I could not take my eyes off that plastic bait box full of squirming white maggots. At least they'll never grow up to be flies.
I really wanted to ask him two things: Where do you go to FIND these maggots, and do you wash your hands good when you get home? But I didn't.
Yeah, I suppose I could fish, but I'm not eating anything that's been eating maggots.
Maybe I could learn to be a fender maker like Leon Evans.
Bearded, bare-chested and bronzed, Leon is sitting in a chair on the canal bulkhead beside his boat. It is the summer home for him and his boys, who are sort of fishing nearby, but mostly just messing around with THEIR maggots.
Leon has a pot of tea brewing and a few sticks of firewood near his feet. He is laboriously working a thick coil of black synthetic rope with an awl.
``Fender making is what I'm doing,'' he says, drawing on his pipe.
Then with a smile, he adds, ``It's not to be confused with what one might do in a Michigan car plant.''
Fenders are very important for protecting the hulls of all canal vessels. Especially for the occasional fiberglass boat in this mass of steel hulls. It's sometimes close quarters here. Leon makes bow fenders and nose buttons - a nest of three rope cushions of graduated sizes, fenders for the stern to protect the rudder and the prop, and those that hang along the gunwales.
He sells them for about two-thirds of what you'd pay in a canalside chandlery. It's not a great living, but it seems like a wonderful life.
He takes time to show me the Weaver Navigation canal just over the bank and down the hill a bit. There, bigger vessels, some of ocean-going size, make their way now and then. Leon says it's a sight to see, but it only happens about once a fortnight these days.
We're joined by Tom Bower, a preservation activist with a scientific bent. He tells us all about efforts to renovate the Anderton Boat Lift, which we passed earlier. It's one of ``Seven Wonders of the Waterways.'' When this massive and ingenious structure was in operation it could lift or lower boats 50 feet between the Trent & Mersey and the Weaver Navigation.
It's stood idle and in disrepair for decades, but money is being collected for its renovation and Tom thinks he'll see the day when it's in operation again.
More important to me at the moment is that Tom, an old hand along the canal, has offered to go back through the Barnton Tunnel with us - just in case I need a pilot. I accept with great gratitude.
That's the sort of people you find along this linear community - warm, friendly, interesting conversationalists, people who'll drop what they're doing and lend a hand if you need it.
Gradually I began to realize that we had been accepted into ``the club'' by other boaters and by those on the banks. Nowhere was the famous British reserve evident. In this micro-world, we, too, were narrowboaters.
Perhaps the Barnton Tunnel had been our initiation.
Darren Boddy appeared out of nowhere, somewhere around the Big Lock, and saved our lives - or, at least, saved us from great embarrassment.
This tall and lanky young man, wearing combat boots and cutoff shorts and a handkerchief tied around his head, helped us through the locks. Which he made look relatively easy, which it isn't.
Let me explain about locks.
Locks are necessary because canals often do not follow the natural contours of the land as rivers do. When rivers drop in grade, rapids or waterfalls occur. Boats cannot negotiate these. Locks are used to raise or lower a canal boat from one level to another.
Leonardo da Vinci invented them. Or at least what makes them work so effectively. That enigmatic genius of the Renaissance is generally given credit for the invention of the mitred canal gate for the San Marco Lock in Milan, although this cannot be substantiated. Certainly it is something that would likely emerge from his fertile mind.
The V-shaped, mitred gates, angled upstream or into the downward force of the stream, have almost universally replaced the earlier vertical lift gates. Mitre gates only open when the water level is equal on both sides.
There are two things you need to know about locks.
First it is easier to go downstream than up because you can move into a lock when it is filled and then be lowered down as the lock is emptied. We were lulled into a certain complacency because Chris Cliff had helped us through the first three, and we went through the fourth - a double lock - with another ``guide'' boat.
Going upstream, it is difficult to keep the boat lined up to enter the lock when water is rushing out. You can end up crossways in a canal before you know what's happening. I know that for a fact.
The second thing is that there is a certain amount of physical activity required in operating the locks. Well, a lot, actually. You have to crank sluices open and closed with a windless to fill and empty the locks, and you have to open and close the mitre gates to let boats in and out. And you have to do it all in the right sequence.
So basically, we needed a lot of help. Quickly.
And that's when Darren, well, just materialized. Sort of like an angel, although he'd be embarrassed by the characterization. Actually, he was traveling with his Mum and family on their narrowboat.
He got us through, running back and forth along the canals, which come in quick succession just north of Middlewich.
Later, when he had moored for the evening, I happened to see him again at another set of locks.
This young man from Nottinghamshire, his face flushed from exertion, won't be long for the canals, I'm afraid. No, I'm certain. And I'm pleased.
He tells me me's getting ready for his A-levels - those are VERY BIG exams in Britain that, successfully passed, open university doors - in chemistry, biology and physics.
``I want to be a biochemist,'' says this teen-ager. ``I want to go into the whiskey industry and find a way to make better enzymes.'' I expect he will.
Some years from now, when Darren is in the whiskey industry, I must remember to make a toast to him - and to all the other people along the canal who make this such a pleasant holiday. ILLUSTRATION: COLOR PHOTOS BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN
ABOVE: Narrowboats round the bend along the Trent & Mersey Canal in
the pastoral English countryside.
TOP: The trip is mostly slow and easy, with a few anxiety-inducing
exceptions such as this thread-the-needle tunnel.
ABOVE: Locks are used to raise or lower a canal boat from one level
to another. Getting through can be a tricky maneuver.
Graphic
NARROWBOATING
What it costs: A week's rental of a fully equipped two- or
four-person barge ranges from about $900 in low season (before May
and after mid-September) to $1,350 in mid-summer. Short breaks (2 to
6 days) are occasionally available.
There are a couple of extra costs. The boats are usually rented
full of fuel, and on return, passengers are charged for what they
use. A security deposit is standard.
Info: Christopher Cliff, Middlewich Narrowboats, Middlewich,
Cheshire, CW10 9BD, United Kingdom; 011+44+1606-832-460.
Request information on other rentals through the U.K. from
British Tourist Authority, 551 Fifth Ave., Seventh Floor, New York,
N.Y. 10176; (212) 986-2200.
Stephen Harriman
by CNB