The waterways are charged with magic, but nothing about them is more magical than the difference made by the few feet of water which separate the boat from the land. Those few feet instantly set the boatman in a world of his own, and his vision of the outer world though which he glides, becomes magically calmer and clearer. Again, this may sound whimsical and improbable: the degree to which it is true can be confirmed only by experience.

Yet my great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way, and rowing another: and I got most of my estate by the same occupation.

When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley,
Swimming along, swimming along,
Swimming along from Severn

We had placed all we required for our toilette in a small portmanteau, and in addition, had provided ourselves with a portable india-rubber bath, a ship's compass, a basket jar of four gallons for water, a small keg to contain a gallon of beer, a luncheon basket fitted with plates, knives, forks, cups, &c. &c, a cooking apperatus, and last, though not least, a complete foul-weather rig of overalls, rugs, umbrellas &c.

I don't think you would know the boat - it is so homely and comfortable - seven beer bottles on the side table at present waiting to be thrown away.

The foregoing pages have dealt with canals as a playground. Needless to say, however, this is not their true vocation. They should be - and are capable of being made - great arteries of national traffic.

By and by, when times change again, I suspect that the sweetness of the Thames Valley will begin to cloy; the old Wander-lust will return, and we shall fare forth again to make our nightly camp under the stars in regions to which our bows have not yet turned

But, if the canals are left to the mercies of economists and scientific planners, before many years are past the last of them will become a weedy stagnant ditch, and the bright boats will rot at the wharves, to live on only in old men's memories. It is because I fear that this may happen that I have made this record of them.

The climb out of the Avon valley means more locks. There are compensations however; you are getting away from Leamington Spa, for one thing.

It is one of the phenomena of the inland waterways that you can go for hours without meeting another boat, then will encounter one on the sharpest and nastiest bend in the system.

We got the tyre off by restarting the engine, then tentatively letting in the clutch. Eventually a lucky pull from the boathook flipped the propeller free and we proceeded into the Stygian gloom of night-time Banbury. We passed through the next lock, negotiated the spiked gate and moored at Tooley's yard for the night. A motion that the tyre be wrapped up and sent to Banbury Town Hall was passed unanimously and promptly forgotten about.

A poet may lament - 'where is Telford
whose bridged canals are still a Shropshire glory?'

To those of us whose business was on inland waterways, it seemed inconceivable that the trade should ever cease. Small carriers might go out of business, a few outlying sections of canal might lose their trade, but to imagine that the great canalside power stations served by fleets of boats should ever close, that the paddles on 'The Junction' might one day fall silent, or the water of the Wyrley & Essington become deserted and weedy, was wholly beyond our imagination.

We may suceed in preserving the canals themselves as strips of water, but we seem intent on destroying everything that gave them interest and meaning, creating instead a Disneyland in which Roses and Castles feature prominently but shafts and shovels do not.

Manchester doesn't seem to have a very clear image of itself. 'Shaping Tomorrow's City Today' is the official local moto, but in fact Manchester seems decidedly of two minds about its place in the world. At Castlefield, they were busy creating yesterday's city today, cleaning up the old brick viaducts and warehouses, recobbling the quaysides, putting fresh coats of glossy paint on the old arched footbridges and scattering about a generous assortment of old-fashioned benches, bollards and lampposts. By the time they have finished, you will be able to see exactly what life was like in nineteenth century Manchester - or at least what it would be like if they had wine-bars, and cast-iron litter bins and directional signs for heritage trails and the G-Mex Centre.

I have only to close my eyes, cross the iron footbridge to the tow-path, take the barge through the short brick tunnel and
there I stand in Eden again

There is paint in my ears and in my hair. I have a fear that one morning I shall wake and find that the family have painted the anchor. Last night I dreamed that I had painted the carburettor. I smell of turpentine. There is paint in the bathroom and paint on the drawingroom chairs; and all the family have chilblains. Never mind. We have painted the boat.

Do not write to me and say that Mr. Conrad did not approve the expression 'casting anchor'. Mr. Conrad travelled in big ships, where somebody said 'Let go!' and the anchor was then dropped. If any one said 'Let go!' in my ship nothing would happen. I have to go forward myself, pick the anchor up, and throw, fling, or cast it over the side. The expression, in this queer vessel, is correct.

One of the greatest pleasures on this earth is steering a narrowboat and, assuming there aren't too many hazards ahead, eating a butty stuffed full of bacon, sausage, egg and tomato, washed down with strong tea from a pint pot.

Gradually the pubs have either closed or been "modernised", which means making them open-plan, removing all the character of the pub and replacing it with "stylish decor", and turning the back parlour into a restaurant. Economic necessity has demanded this in some cases, but often it is a result of a survey which has been carried out by a brewery or pub company. This, apparently, tells them that we all want to eat in plastic palaces from an identical menu where even the number of chips and peas on a plate can be guaranteed, and we certainly don't want proper local pubs serving a good selection of real ale, hearty home-cooked food and an atmosphere conducive to live music, darts, dommies and conversation.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting

You cannot suddenly, out of the blue, ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer:

"Whether he is aware that a small boy of repulsive appearance threw a stone the size of a duck's egg at the passengers in Mr. Haddock's boat proceeding under Lambeth Bridge on July 4th last, and nearly killed a lady-mariner, and what does he propose to do about it?"

For the Chancellor of the Exchequer is not responsible for small boys or Lambeth Bridge.

Gas Street is unique, and any future development that attempts to destroy or, just as bad, "improve" it would be destroying the irreplacable. That such a place has survived in the centre of Birmingham in the second part of the twentieth century is a blessed accident, but one that should be defended.

Passing down Broad Street towards the bridge, he turned to the left and sauntered along beside the Severn. The water glittered in the light of the setting sun; barges, some of them bearing men and women and children, passed smoothly up and down on it; the opposite fields, towards St. John's, were green as an emerald; all things seemed to wear an aspect of brightness.

I chose to give it the title of circuits, in the plural, because I do not pretend to have travelled it all in one journey, but in many, and some of them many times over; the better to inform myself of every thing I could find worth taking notice of.

The Parrot began to move away from the wharf, nosing out into the inky waters, past Mrs Shore's Aberlystwyth, with the washing fluttering from the line, answering the tiller, pointing its long, narrow shape straight down the canal.

The blank sides of great factories stared down on us, walling us in. Sometimes there was faded lettering on their sides to give a clue to their contents: Compressors . . . Tubes . . . Tangye's Cornwall Works. It was an uncanny sensation. We were passing through the heart of a great city. Yet one had an oddly isolated, almost disembodied, feeling as we chugged steadily on through the black, still water, our engine echoing hollowly under the old cast-iron bridges.

And there was the vale of Evesham, the whole vale, lying at my feet like a Promised Land - a vast green plain, soft and warmly sunlit, dotted with villages that clustered around square stone towers, flecked with the lighter green where the willows traced the meanderings of the Avon.

I was running down that long, narrow, busy main street to the great Avon bridge in Evesham. And there it was, just as I had imagined it, the placid river, swinging round into the great bend that contains the town, the swans, the white boathouse, and, then, on the other side - through the high riverside curtain of limes - the Bell Tower of the old Abbey.

It seemed hard to believe - yet there were old people in Evesham who could still recall the days when barges of coal and corn had come into the town by the river. But since then the Avon, like so many once thriving waterways of England had fallen into decay. Debris choked its course. Its wiers were broken down. The locks had silted up or carved in from neglect.

She and Tom Shackleton had been travelling up and down the canals of England almost as long as they could remember. Both of their fathers had been boatmen; for that was the way it was on the canals and that was the way it had to be; this was a world, a whole world of its own, a world you had to be born to, which was neither of the town nor of the country, of the past nor yet of the present, a timeless world, without newspapers, without the cold war, or television, or all the familiar furniture the rest of us knew; yet a world peopled by its own rich personalities, whose news drifted in shouts from the backs of passing boats, a world of busy movement too, not at jet-age speed but at a speed the human heart could compass

Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the wind-mill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green cornlands; the most picturesque of things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace as if there were no such things as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the barges waiting their turn at a lock, affords a fine lession in how easily the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.

The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his floating home, "travelling abed," it is merely as if he were listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a picture book in which he had no concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside.

I am sure that I would rather be a bargee than occupy any position under Heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few callings, I should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in return for regular meals. The bargee is on shipboard - he is master of his own ship - he can land whenever he will - he can never be kept beating off a leeshore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron; and so far as I can make out, time stands as nearly still with him as is compatible with the return of bed-time or dinner-hour. It is not easy to see why a bargee should ever die.

There's nothing so contagious in a boat as rivets going

If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.

Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake.

We had come out for a fortnight's enjoyment on the river, and a fortnight's enjoyment on the river we meant to have. If it killed us! well, that would be a sad thing for our friends and relations, but it could not be helped.

Few objects, in this mechanised modern world, instill in their owners as much conern and love as their boats.

Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

The sea-reach of the Thames streched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished spirits.

There're all these people who wouldn't be caught dead polishing a doorknob in their house but put them on a boat and they want to rub down everything in sight.

Twenty Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the tradewinds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

The acquisition of the knowledge of navigation has a strange effect on the minds of men.

The barge she sat in, like a burnishd throne, burnd on the water; the poop was beaten gold, purple the sails, and so perfumed, that the winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver, which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made the water which they beat to follow faster, as amorous of their strokes. For her own person, it beggard all description.

Under the heading "A Wigan Fairy Tale" a writer in the Manchester Guardian Miscellany column tells us that "Wigan Pier" is to be dismantled. That is rather like announcing that four o'clock tomorrow afternoon is to be thoroughly overhauled and painted green.

The river wound and gleamed ahead, each new reach opening a new vista of green-and-gold willows and green water meadows, the general scene pleasantly unchanging, but each new reach always subtly different from the one before it.

I don't wonder you love boating Mr Allnut

One thing I've learnt subsequently about canal people is that on the whole they are some of the friendliest and most laid-back you'll meet anywhere in the world. Perhaps it's something to do with the pace of life on a canal, for at three miles an hour, life's boy racers hardly gravitiate towards narrowboats for their kicks. Or maybe it's something to do with the ambience which surrounds thee quiet byways threading through the countryside, for there's something about water – any water – which seems to act like a sedative, making people calmer and quieter, and on the whole more considerate and forgiving than totally land-centred people.

In the early 1970s you were part of a secret, undiscovered world which was of the present, yet separate from it. The canals then were winding. overgrown ribbons of water which took you across aqueducts and embankments, and through cuttings and bat-filled tunnels to a world that seemed unchanged for centuries. Or they were black inacessible ditches tucked away behind factories and leading to the dark, oily recesses of cities unfamiliar even to the people who lived in them.

The old canal, from bank to bank,
Is filled with reeds and rushes rank;
And down this lane of living green
March memories of what has been.

The painted barges came from town,
And busy life flowed up and down;
But there is nothing left to show
Where those old barges used to go.

Progress is always marching on;
The old canal is dead and gone,
But still we seem to hear it say:
"I, too, was progress--yesterday."

No, seriously. I'm doing some research into pubs with the word 'boat' in the title.

In the dark canal a full moon was reflected, like a round white light under the water. Trees trailed thin branches across its surface as if to catch the moon in their net. It could have been some broad sluggish river they sat beside, with dense vegetation growing down to its banks, a mass of complex leafiness that might have stretched, for all that could be seen, back across the city for miles, covering buildings in a dark wilderness.

At one time on one of the little muddy canals that run round the town, there used to be a tumble-down wooden jetty; and by way of a joke someone nicknamed this Wigan Pier. ...to judge from the photographs it must have been about twenty feet long. ...I made a journey specially to see it in 1936, and I couldn't find it. ...I am afraid I must tell you that Wigan Pier doesn't exist. ...the place itself had been demolished.

The boat came close to the bank again, and before she had had any more time for consideration, she and her grandfather were on board, and gliding smoothly down the canal. The sun shone pleasantly on the bright water, which was sometimes shaded by trees, and sometimes open to a wide extent of country, intersected by running streams, and rich with wooded hills, cultivated land, and sheltered farms. Now and then, a village with its modest spire, thatched roofs, and gable-ends, would peep out from among the trees; and, more than once, a distant town, with great church towers looming through its smoke, and high factories or workshops rising above the mass of houses, would come in view, and, by the length of time it lingered in the distance, show them how slowly they travelled. Their way lay, for the most part, through the low grounds, and open plains; and except these distant places, and occasionally some men working in the fields, or lounging on the bridges under which they passed, to see them creep along, nothing encroached on their monotonous and secluded track.

Chugging along between banks of green willow,
Buttercup meadows, sweet nettle and dock,
Sheep in the meadow so peaceful and still-o,
And just 'round the bend we reach Camberwick Lock.
Nothing is better than being at large
In charge of a gay inland waterway barge

The sun on the water is glinting and gleaming
Soon we are leaving the Camberwick Lock
Pass by the anglers all drowsily dreaming
And far in the distance chimes Trumpton town clock
Nothing is better than being at large
In charge of a gay inland waterway barge

One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see - I've forgot the name of the program - but you get the satellite, and you can - like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.