Messing About in Boats

When I decided to bring a bike with me to the UK in 2010, it was the canal paths that attracted me. Cycling through the countryside is delightful but cycling along a canal path is magic. There's something about water that is endlessly fascinating.

That fascination can be the only explanation for the mania for canal-boat holidays. I can cycle faster than a canal boat when I'm just ambling along. If you suggested to most people that it might be fun to drive along a road at 4 mph, they would laugh at the idea. Yet so many people are more than happy to proceed along a canal at 4 mph. Ask them to spend two minutes at a set of traffic lights and they become ropeable. But those same people will spend any amount of time going through a lock that requires them to, perhaps, wait for someone ahead to go through, then leave the boat, fill or empty the lock depending which way they're going, enter the lock, wait for it to fill or empty, open the lock gates and motor away. I repeat, the fascination with water can be the only explanation.

Yesterday I went to Marple where there is a flight of 16 locks on the Peak Forest Canal. The locks cover a mile of the canal and patience would be required to travel from top to bottom or vice versa.

The canal was built in 1790s to transport lime from the area to Manchester and beyond. The lime was also burnt for quick lime in local kilns, a process that required coal to be brought in via the canal system.

A boat towed by one big shire horse plodding along the tow path could haul ten times the weight that the same horse could haul on land, resulting in dramatically reduced transport costs. If the horse knew his job he didn't even need a man to lead him.

The Macclesfield Canal has some curious 'roving' or 'snake' bridges. These are designed to allow a horse to be taken over the bridge without unhooking the tow line when the path crosses from one side of the canal to the other.

The building of canals was privately funded by business men who would profit from a cheaper, faster, safer method of transport, the roads being rough and often impassable, to say nothing of the danger of highwaymen. Men whose goods were breakable (and valuable) like Josiah Wedgwood's benefited greatly from the new canal system. Some put up money as an investment in the future. But the future had something else in store: the railroad.

By the mid 1800s canal usage was in decline and was never to recover its commercial trade. The 1900s brought road-transport and, after WWII, the canals quickly became redundant.

When the 1960s arrived a new generation saw the leisure potential in the old canals and volunteer groups started to restore them for holiday use. The success of these projects led to the injection of government funding for major restoration works like the construction of the wonderful Falkirk Wheel boat lift in Scotland which I wrote about here. 

It's good to know that the hard work of the thousands of men who dug the canals by hand from the mid 1700s has not gone to waste.

I cycled along the upper section of the canal towards Whaley Bridge and came across a number of lift bridges. A boat travelling on the canal must stop, activate the mechanism to lift the bridge, motor through then put the bridge back where they found it. So, between delays for travelling through locks and bridges and the requirement to keep to 3 or 4 mph, one can only assume that the aforementioned fascination with water must override a person's otherwise impatient nature.