A narrowboat journey across England

A feeling akin to "passing through a portal to a former century"

(Image credit: John Longley / Getty Images)

published 22 September 2024

There are more than 2,000 miles of interconnected waterways in England and Wales. In my 17-metre narrowboat, I travelled from the northernmost point in the network – "within sight of the Lake District" – to the southernmost, about 30 miles from the Channel, said Paul Miles in The Guardian. This journey took 16 months – longer than it need have, because I enjoyed some "meandering diversions" (swelling my route from the most direct 387 miles to 517 miles), and paused for a few days here and there. But with a speed limit of four miles per hour on the canals, hurrying was never an option. I felt as if I had "passed through a portal to a former century", and was moving at the pace of the changing seasons.

Over weeks and months, I watched the geology, the landscape, the vernacular architecture around me change. And the wild was never far away. The canals were edged with wildflowers even within sight of towns and cities. In Wigan – not far from Tewitfield, where my journey began – I passed through the Flashes, a landscape of lakes formed by mining subsidence. Visiting in the 1930s, George Orwell described the grim industrial scene: nothing existed, he wrote, "except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water". Today, the pools are edged with birch and willow; birds and yachts skim across their glittering waters. In Staffordshire, I moored one evening under beech trees near the River Trent, and watched the sunlight playing through the leaves as a million river flies danced above the dark canal. In Banbury, I saw otters; elsewhere, herons and kingfishers were my daily companions.

History often felt close – at Braunston, for instance, folk memories linger of the strike of 1923, when boatmen blockaded the canal in protest at wage cuts brought on by the "inexorable" rise of road haulage. And yet this was an adventure that brought me closer to the "timeless" – not least at Godalming, my journey's end, where I disembarked beside a "coppery meadow", watched by skittish deer and serenaded by owls.