Leeds-liverpool canal
Lucy Baring pootles along by boat
IT’S August 2007, one of the wettest summers on record. We drive past flooded fields in a car full of children, food and bicycles heading for Keighley, West Yorkshire, where we will meet three other families to spend a week on the 200year-old Leeds-liverpool canal, the longest single waterway canal in Britain.
At the boatyard, Zam, my husband, will present the T-shirts he’s had printed with each person’s name above the name of their family’s respective barge. I am, therefore, in Lucy Megan, he’s in Zam Megan and, from the photographs, it seems we’re the only ones who ever wore these.
We’re given a brief lesson on locks (there are 91 of them on the main line), steering and routes, but none on canal etiquette, which turns out to be extensive (speed limit 4mph or 2mph when passing other vessels, for instance, share locks to save water and don’t pull out in front of another boat).
The owner hops about, nimbly moving from vessel to vessel until he straddles two barges that appear to be moving away from one another and, cartoonlike, he’s doing the splits before plopping into the canal. ‘That’s never happened to me before,’ he splutters. We stare down at him and hope this is not an omen.
We’re eight adults with 16 children aged from five to 17 on four barges, which—this is not to be underestimated—means four captains. The first barge (Katie) sets off before the last barge (Molly) has been handed over and thus the die is cast for the pecking order and a heated discussion about team spirit.
Molly becomes the ‘party barge’ on which all the children gather every night, possibly because she’s wider and possibly because her captain has such chronic back pain that he can only steer when doubled over and dosed up on painkillers. This, combined with his high anxiety about being in charge of a 40-tonne vessel, means that, by evening, he doesn’t notice he’s losing money to eight year olds at poker.
We chug along, drinking rosé in the rain, yelling instructions, counting swans, listening to echoes in the Foulridge Tunnel, waving at regulars, who don’t wave back—canal dwellers can’t stand incompetent tourists. Katie enters the first lock as we all do the barge equivalent of treading water waiting for our turn. One lapse in concentration and we’re wedged in the lock opening as the queue behind us builds and regulars gnash their teeth.
It’s difficult to find a stretch of bank long enough for our convoy to moor against over
night that we agree on—too noisy, a pylon, too many trees—so off we chug as the light fades, wondering if there’s enough pasta for supper.
Tomorrow, we’ll bicycle to the nearest town for provisions, only to find that, despite two days of chugging, it’s the same town we cycled to yesterday. Barge holidays are either a monotonous loop of nothing much or a lovely dreamlike drift through place and time, often on the same day.
In the evenings, we line up on the towpath in folding chairs, passing wine down and conversation up (there’s nowhere on a barge or its environs to sit in a circle). We make so much noise the children wail from their bunks: ‘Please shut up, we’re trying to sleep.’
On our penultimate day, we must rise early to reach the Bingley Five Rise locks, but the party barge is silent, so we set off as they’re asleep. This goes down so badly that the two barges cease communications for a morning.
Oddly, 11 years later, nobody can agree on whether we actually climbed that magnificent staircase of locks, but everyone remembers the last night, when the sun came out, the children ran whooping down banks of swaying grass and Molly’s captain played the guitar. We all still think it was one of the best holidays ever. Lucy Baring
‘Barge holidays are either a loop of nothing much or a lovely dreamlike drift