The bucolic ideal of rural England is alive and well on its canals

Paul Miles is following in the wake of narrowboating pioneer LTC Rolt, tracing a journey he made and wrote about more than 80 years ago, reflecting on how England has changed, and considering why so many people still find pleasure on the country’s canals. This is the final part of his journey. You can read the first instalment here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.

“For nearly three months we lay at Banbury, held immovable in the grip of ice six inches thick. It soon became difficult to believe that we had ever been afloat, for the familiar rocking motion with which the boat responded to our movements had ceased, and when, after a fortnight of black frost, a heavy fall of snow covered the boat, the canal and the banks in a uniform mantle of white, the illusion of a solid foundation was complete. At night the ice creaked and cracked with hollow reverberation.”

On their 400-mile figure-of-eight canal voyage in from 1939 to 1940, the Rolts found themselves held fast in Oxfordshire, back at the starting point of their journey. Eventually, once the thaw had started, a horse-drawn ice-breaker appeared to smash through the frozen canal.

My journey following in the Rolts’ wake has also reached a standstill. The Canal & River Trust (CRT) undertakes scheduled repairs in the off-season. At the time of writing, lock number three on the Atherstone flight in Warwickshire is impassable. By the time you read this though, I will be on my way again in my narrowboat home, retracing the final 80 miles to the book’s closing chapter south of Banbury in Shipton on Cherwell, Oxfordshire.

In November, I was on the Middlewich branch of the Shropshire Union Canal with views over fields to the River Weaver. From there, I turned left at Barbridge Junction.

In Nantwich, the canal is high on an embankment, like a city wall surrounding the town. From near a cast iron aqueduct across the Chester road, I peered over tall new-build houses. A short walk into town and I found the very fine old black-and-white timbered buildings that Rolt admired, such as the Crown Hotel with floors so wonky you could race marbles down them. Rolt noted that the shops were of a “high” standard, “unlike Crewe”.

They still are. There are interior designers, gentlemen’s outfitters, expensive furniture shops and a cheesemonger. In the 1930s there was a weekly cheese market, with wheels of cheese arriving on horse-drawn wooden “fly boats”, but now Cheshire cheese is hard to come by. “There’s only one farm entirely in Cheshire still making it,” said the cheesemonger’s proprietor.

I took a swim in the brine baths, an open-air heated pool. Brine springs brought wealth to the citizens of Nantwich, and this prosperity is particularly noticeable in the town’s church, St Mary’s. “We call it the cathedral of south Cheshire,” said a volunteer. The beautifully lit choir stalls and misericords are elaborately carved. “Poetry in oak,” wrote Rolt. “A nightmare to dust,” said the volunteer.

I cruised on. This canal is one of the newer ones, built in the 19th century. It continues straight through the level pastures of Cheshire, where cattle stop to stare. Beyond Hack Green, after canal-side signs for a “secret nuclear bunker”, I reached the Audlem flight of locks.

Mist was rising from wooden lock beams in the morning sun and a spider’s web was jewelled with raindrops. The Rolts “made short work” of these 15 locks, with Angela riding ahead on the bicycle to raise the paddles and empty the chambers and Tom pushing lock gates open with the boat, a practice frowned upon today as it can cause damage. Solo, it took me over three hours. By mid-afternoon, my boat having risen 93ft in one and a half miles, I moored at the top of the flight in a wooded section with a gap in the trees where the sun sank into pastureland while a skein of geese flew overhead.

After a night filled with the hooting of owls, the scenery became timelessly English and pastoral. The canal was now among hilltops. Fields were hemmed with hedges and dotted with solitary oaks. Small herds of cattle grazed. Then there were yet more locks: five to ascend, unkempt and overgrown.

At Market Drayton’s market, I found stalls selling rare exotic gems – ammolite, moldavite – and smart kitchen equipment, huge scones and merino wool socks. The cheese-man cut me a slice of Shropshire Blue. Rolt had enjoyed a “throng of stalls” where “countrywomen stood on the kerb-sides with great baskets of eggs, trussed poultry and vegetables.”

Onwards from here, yet more locks ascend within tree-lined sandstone cuttings, where holes in the rock-face suggest that sand martins nest in spring and summer. Rolt wrote: “The trees which interlace their branches high overhead to cover the water with perpetual shadow lean crazily one upon the other from their crumbling root holds on the slopes. Like a tropical jungle their branches trail heavy curtains of creepers, dark ivy and silvery Old Man’s Beard.” In places the towpath and part of the narrow waterway was blocked by chunks of rock that had crashed down, bringing trees with them. Cruising under tall bridges that span the top of the precipitous cutting is like briefly entering the sanctuary of a church’s nave.

When Rolt cruised past, Norbury Junction was the turn-off for narrowboats heading into Shrewsbury. He vowed to come back one day and travel that canal’s length. Sadly, the Shrewsbury and Newport Canal is one waterway that has not survived into the 21st century. A short section of it, used as moorings, is all that remains at the junction although work is underway to restore its full 25 miles. Beyond the junction, the scenery opens out, the canal high on embankments now at tree canopy level above farmland with views of the Wrekin.

I moored in the pretty village of Brewood where at last I found a pub that serves what was Rolt’s favourite tipple, mild. “We always have Banks’s mild on tap,” said the barman at The Bridge Inn. It seems that the West Midlands is a last stronghold of mild drinkers. For how long is uncertain. Banks’s Brewery, in Wolverhampton, is scheduled for closure next autumn.

Nearing Wolverhampton – at Autherley Junction – the Rolts found “a veritable no-man’s land”, where “the water became black with pollution”. I saw a field with cattle and new-built homes beside the canal. At the junction I turned left, onto the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal.

In the village of Coven, The Anchor Inn is a pleasant canal-side pub with two real fires (but no mild). I cruised on to a spot that seemed like the middle of nowhere but on a map, motorways and railways cavorted nearby. Near a historic bridge carrying a footpath from a farm, I moored among autumn colours: lemon yellow of large-leafed lime, carmine of field maple and dull copper of oak.

Near the south Staffordshire village of Calf Heath, the canal squeezes through the middle of a chemical works. A sign prohibits mooring along a 200m stretch and warns boaters not to stop if an alarm sounds. Pipes cross the canal, from one section of the site to another. The gorse- and birch-edged canal is fenced off from the works, its presence an inconvenience rather than a means of transporting raw materials and finished products as it would have been in the 1930s.

After the canal skirted Stafford, I reached Tixall Wide, where the waterway opens out into an attractive lake. Goosanders swam past skittishly and Canada geese honked. In 1939, Rolt found this stretch of waterway particularly disused and weedy. The lock-keeper remarked that Cressy was the first boat through for six months. In contrast, I was among three boats passing through Tixall Lock within half an hour. The pretty, twisty Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal is deservedly popular.

From Great Haywood junction I was back on the Trent & Mersey again, heading south this time, following the adjacent flow of a River Trent in spate, back, eventually, to Fradley Junction where I joined the Coventry Canal. There were nights of hard frost, ropes freezing stiff, the boat covered in sparkles – but the canal did not freeze. Yet, here I am still, near the village of Polesworth in Warwickshire, waiting for the lock flight ahead to reopen.

When Rolt cruised here the area was busy with coal mines. “They were changing shifts at the collieries… for we met many pitmen trudging home by twos and threes along the towpath, their faces blackened with coal dust and sweat… We passed through the heart of some of these pits between barren shale tips… spinning headgears and basins where boats were loading.”

Today, instead of miners trudging there are dog-walkers and cyclists. A once-spinning wheel of the Pooley colliery headgear sits by the canal, painted in rainbow colours. Nearby, the new Pit Stop cafe has a small exhibition on coal mining, which continued in Warwickshire until 2013. The barren shale tips, or “bings”, now merge into the landscape, colonised with young trees. The tallest – over 300ft – now has a 40ft monument on its summit, a “golden tower of leaves” that reportedly cost £100,000.

It made me wonder what Rolt would think of all these changes. The scarcity of his favourite beer aside, I concluded that he would have mixed feelings. As well as decrying the above-ground desecration wrought by mining, he wrote of the “hell below earth that the demand for power has created.” He would approve of our transition to cleaner, renewable energy and the phasing out of dirty industry such as the 2,000 bottle ovens of Stoke on Trent that filled the sky with billowing coal smoke and the textile industry of Leicester that poisoned water.

While Rolt would appreciate improved legislation – such as the clean air act of 1956 – that means such obvious pollution should not happen today, he might be surprised that we allow sewage to enter our rivers. Nor would he relish much of what passes for modern industry. Seen through the eyes of someone from the 1930s, modern Britain – or England at least – seems to have become obsessed with speed and easy consumerism; everywhere busy with road traffic.

A brief trip away from the boat to make an excursion into Lichfield found me cycling beside a noisy A-road past huge featureless warehouses and through an HS2 construction site. In amongst the chaos were estates of new houses like a child might draw. The landscape was flat, the ground churned like a battlefield. This edgeland was all depressingly ugly. It is as if we think progress only means bigger and faster.

Perhaps that has long been the case. After all, those straight 19th-century canals were built for “speed”. Rolt loved the “tantalising twists and turns” of the older canals and, I believe, of life itself. He yearned for a bucolic ideal, a rural England of fine craftsmanship, vernacular architecture and small farms, a world that was beginning to disappear even in the 1930s. Rolt’s boat Cressy and the canal offered solace.

The inland waterways network remains an alternative world of relative peace, away from hurtling HGVs or even faster modes of transport. HS2 might be carving its way through our countryside with a slowness that would amuse 19th-century engineers but our historic canals are thankfully left intact, spared the fate of those that were bulldozed during the era of motorway construction.

While, like the Rolts, I have seen plenty of kingfishers and herons on my voyage, I have not spotted one little grebe – or dabchick – that the Rolts saw frequently. They also spied a red squirrel in woodland at Hopwas. Red squirrels have long gone from Staffordshire. Britain has become one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

There have been many changes in 85 years. The UK population has grown from 42 million to 69 million, creating a need for many more houses. We have moved from a manufacturing economy to a service one, exporting many of our manufacturing needs overseas. Along the canal – now a leisure-oriented asset rather than an industrial one – big, expensive new-build homes have sprouted. Gyms, cafes and artists’ studios now inhabit former industrial spaces.

We were on the brink of a world war when the Rolts set off on their voyage in 1939. Sometimes it seems that we are close to that again. In these troubled, fast-changing times it can be reassuring to know that at least one thing remains constant: hundreds of miles of inland waterways on which narrowboats have travelled for over a century. It is a parallel world of silence and slow time; a network of watery highways, ancient locks and arched brick bridges still scarred with grooves worn by the tow-ropes of horses.