Canal Dreams

It’s a new dawn,
It’s a new day,
It’s a new life for me,
And I’m feeling good…

Nina Simone, from I put a Spell on You

Yesterday at the campsite I managed to successfully apply new Compeed plasters to both my heels. I was reasonably confident that with a good night’s rest, I would be able to do the full 25 km to Cosgrove, the end of my journey along the canal, and (luxury!) my Airbnb.

I don’t know whether it was the coffee I had yesterday afternoon, or the general clamminess of the air (the shower had been too disgusting to even think of using), but I could not get to sleep. I perhaps slept for 10 minutes between 4.00 and 4:30am, but otherwise I lay awake. I had set my alarm for 6.00 wanting to be away by 7.00, but I got up at 5:30 anyway, and started to pack up. Brenda appeared at my tent flap to offer me a coffee or tea, the absolute sweetheart. I gratefully accepted a coffee, and she returned 5 minutes later, with a steaming cup, a little cake, and an apple. I told her I would put those in my pocket for later, and eat them when I got tired or hot, and I would think of her and thank her. What immense kindness so early in the morning!

I was away by 6.30, an enormous smile on my face from the jolt of caffeine, but mostly put there by Brenda’s thoughtfulness.

Despite my sleepless night, I was feeling good. My feet were feeling eminently walkable-on. I rejoined the towpath, straightened my spine, breathed into the back of my ribs, and used my poles to propel me forwards. The air smelt of honeysuckle.

The path was firm and overarched with crabapple and sprays of dog rose. The early morning creatures were not as shy as they might be later. Or perhaps it just seemed that way because I did not have to focus 100% of my attention on the path, and could look ahead and out over the water, and observe what was around me. Two young blackbirds were fighting like dogs on the path ahead and didn’t notice me until I was almost upon them. And a heron stood absolutely motionless in a hunting attitude on the other side of the canal in the shadows. He watched me warily as I passed, but did not move.

The paths were really only clear around little villages and marinas. The canal mostly ran through open farming land, though, and the tow path had long tracts of weeds. But I felt so much better able to cope with them than yesterday: in fact, I felt completely normal. The path was just as dangerously pitted, my feet were just as soaked with the dew, I was just as wreathed in spider silk, but I took it all literally in my stride today.

In fact, I soon had to stop to exchange my longsleeved top for a short one. On the bank some water forget-me-not was flowering,

and a patch of early square-stemmed figwort was not of interest to wasps, as in my own garden, but here eaten by mullein moth caterpillars.

Yellow flag iris is still a beautiful feature,

And there were patches where cranesbill was predominant, colouring the bank purple-blue.

The early industrial heritage of the canal has not been a feature of my journey so far, except for this barn, which appeared to have several water gates to facilitate transport up and down the river.

The farmhouse to which the barn belonged was similarly old, and the bridge leading to it particularly attractive. They seem to be around the right date for the construction of the original Grand Junction Canal, between 1783 and 1805, which ran from Braunston to the Thames.

Approaching Blisworth/Gayton Junction, I saw a swallow skimming over the water at last. A few moments later, three others joined her, chattering noisily. A coot crossed the canal in front of me, carrying what looked like a piece of wet reed in his beak. Sure enough, he was carrying it to a nest on the far side away from the tow path. The female coot had all her plumage fluffed up and looked enormous. The male offered her the reed, but she testily flung it back at him when he tried to add it to the nest. This dynamic went on back-and-forth for some moments until she got up, launched into the water, and swam away. He climbed onto the nest to take his turn, and tucked in his piece of reed where he wanted it, as a tiny black cootling nestled itself back in.

They were too tiny to photograph, but the pair of swans with their downy grey goslings were easier to capture. The swan and goslings on the nest itself were all busy preening themselves; the parent bird in the water was tearing energetically at great clumps of reeds.

It was now getting on for 10.30, four hours after I had set out, and I was needing a coffee. Blisworth seemed a sizeable destination and a likely source, if the huge cotton mill was anything to go by (built in 1879, it is now converted into flats, although it had a stint during World War II storage for hundreds of tonnes of tinned rations).

I asked a chap walking his dog whether there was a café. There wasn’t. What about the bakery on Google Maps? Closed down. I was rather dejected at this news, as I was now going to have to negotiate my way over the top off the immensely long Blisworth tunnel — which at a whopping 2.8km, was even longer than the Braunston tunnel further back up the canal (which I had avoided by dint of the lift from Clive and James yesterday) — without the benefit of any food or drink.

The second resident I asked about coffee, a lady walking smartly along the canal looking decisively caffeinated, said yes, it was available at the village shop. I was now thoroughly confused. What was sure, though, was that I needed a sit-down, and I wasn’t going to get it in Blisworth. There was nothing for it but to schlep the 3km along the pedestrian alternative to the towpathless tunnel. I wasn’t quite sure how to do this: the map wasn’t at all clear.

On the matter of locating this path, I consulted yet another local, Andy, sitting at the back of his boat, smoking a rollup. He said he’d be going through the tunnel in about an hour, and would I like a lift?

WOULD I!! I had been thinking all morning what a crying shame it would be to have enjoyed walking alongside the narrowboat community for three days and not to have been able to set foot on a boat.

Andy and Stevie have sold up in Grimsby and have just bought the beautiful boat to be their new home. Today their friend Rachel was visiting from Lincolnshire, and they all welcomed me on board like we had known each other forever.

Before setting off on the 40-minute tunnelling adventure there were mugs of tea and a massive plate of bacon and sausage butties cooked by Andy in the galley, and a heap of laughter. Warwick Davis had been on the boat a few days ago (a roundabout family connection) — so Stevie and Andy’s guest list is an exalted one!

Even though I have done a fair bit of sailing over the years, it was all unfamiliar. Narrow-boating is full of skill and technique. The management of the locks looks phenomenally hard, but it was fascinating even just being on the water side of the unmooring process. What an extraordinary thing to be able simply to loose a rope and move your house to a new location.

If the canal is beautiful from the bank, it was indescribable from the water. ‘Round the corner it looks just like the Amazon,’ said Stevie. And he was right: cool and green and peaceful, the canal water seemed to slip creamily past the boat and the reflections of the vegetation in the water made it look as though we were suspended in a wraparound tunnel of greenery.

But the real tunnel lay ahead.

Built between 1793 and 1805, the Blisworth tunnel construction was the final section of the canal to be completed, and pushed the boundaries of what was possible in civil engineering projects. What are now air shafts were some of the original drilling shafts: on the surface, a series of about twenty vertical shafts were sunk using Stoke Bruerne church as a sightline, and tunnels dug forwards and backwards to join up underground. Errors were made, though, and the tunnel was kinked: the whole thing ran into a seam of quicksand and collapsed, killing fourteen men.

The tunnel was completely dark, lit only by the boat’s lamp and the dwindling light of another boat ahead. The photographs magnified what light there was and make it seem as though it was brighter — but it really was pitch black. There were no other boats coming the other way, which was lucky, because, as Andy told me, there is a 4-inch clearance between narrowboats in this 15-foot wide tunnel.

Steering the boat through this tunnel struck me as being immensely skilful. Andy explained that because the boat is so long and narrow, even a small movement of the rudder can alter the boat’s direction, and it takes a couple of seconds to bring the front of the boat back round again. To manage this in the dark, with just the light at the front of the boat, 58 feet away, is some task.

Rachel and I sat in the front for a while as Stevie entertained us: the central section of this tunnel was closed for a while and used to test out drilling techniques for the channel tunnel, he told us: two hundred years later, then, this tunnel has still been at the forefront of civil engineering possibilities. The middle section — a kilometre in — was concrete rather than brick, from period of repair and experimentation.

Before the days of diesel engines — or tugs, in the early 1900s — narrowboatmen used to have to ‘leg it’ through the tunnel by lying on their backs on the roof of the boat and pushing the boat with their feet walking along the brick vault.

Every now and then we had to retreat into the cabin, because the water poured down the air shafts in a circle of dim green light, draining from the soil above. Where water seeped through there were mineral deposits building up like the stalactites and curtain formations in cave systems.

The whole experience was exactly like being in that scene in Harry Potter 7 where they are taken down into the dark in the tunnels below Gringotts to rob the bank vault.

Stevie offered us some chocolates. Warwick Davies had brought them. It occurred to me that we were recreating a scene from Harry Potter with chocolates supplied by actual Griphook.

The tiny light from the boat in front began to be eclipsed by a growing circle of daylight and suddenly we were out into full sunshine again.

Reader, I cannot tell you what a wonderful day I was having. Brenda’s breakfast and now this whole extraordinary experience… after the ghastliness of yesterday today I was all but floating on air. If this was Harry Potter I had drunk the Felix Felicis for sure.

We took some last photos and I bid farewell to these two men and their movable home on the water, and to their old friend. I look forward to them eventually finding their way to Stourport or Worcester, and coming to visit! And I hope they bring Rachel with them too: love you, guys!

And so I walked on, my canal dream fulfilled, and nothing could dent my mood — I was grinning from ear to ear.

Stoke Bruerne was bustling for such a tiny place, full of tourists and canal folk.

It lies at the end of a seven-lock flight; I can imagine in the summer how impossibly busy it gets trying to move through the locks. And also exhausting to have to open and close them all.

It was beautifully warm without being as stifling as it has been over the past few days. More flowers were responding and blooming: meadowsweet really does have a sweet smell, and the banks were lined with it.

Here was the first of the purple loosestrife,

and a stonecrop in festival colours made its appearance.

All along this section (because it was a charmed day) there was a mown path,

And (because it was a charmed day), Phil was catching a little roach as I walked past, so I could see the life which was underwater and which is only visible to someone on the bank in the concentric rings of ripples as a fish surfaces invisibly to feed.

Further on a long line of Canada geese and their goslings all followed one behind the other, as though they were on a canal tour in a narrow boat of their own.

There was a very strange few metres where the ground was littered with individual wings from beautiful demoiselles. I couldn’t think why. Might it be some predator that catches them on the wing, eats the bodies and leaves the wings? The tracery of each wing was exquisite.

And because it was a charmed day, two damselflies alighted on a reed next to me, he clasping her just behind the head with the pincers at the end of his tail, and she bending her entire body upwards to meet his.

I reached the Navigation Inn at Cosgrove at last, and ordered a recovery drink and a gigantic chicken salad.

My AirBnB was next door – as luxurious as one could wish. And to end the perfect day, when I returned for supper, Georgia at The Navigation gave me some pancakes and blueberries and Greek honey yoghurt from the breakfast menu to take away for tomorrow morning.