Paul Gogarty - The Water Road: An Odyssey by Narrowboat Through England’s Waterways

www.anovabooks.com

The Water Road A Narrowboat Odyssey Through England is Paul Gogartys first English travelogue. The second, The Coast Road - A 3,000-Mile Journey Round the Edge of England is also available from Portico Books

Praise for The Water Road:

Gogarty has a sharp eye for character and his warm-hearted book proves a triumph of the romantic spirit, a labour of love among the slow-moving, quickwitted narrow-boaters of England. This world is evoked with wit and a wealth of lively anecdotage by a writer who is always good company.

Roger Deakin, Daily Telegraph

Paul Gogarty manages brilliantly to convey a boatmans total euphoria in his delightful account of a four-month narrowboat idyll spent pootling along the 900 miles of central Englands inland waterways known as the Cut his enthusiasm bounces off every page and I was completely mesmerised.

Val Hennessy, Critics Choice in the Daily Mail

entertaining, informative and thought-provoking The book is a classic.

Margaret Cornish, Waterways World

His tale is a compelling contrast of light and shade populated by a peculiar cast of characters of almost Dickensian eccentricity.

Morgan Falconer, Ham & High Express

Since Rolt, it would be reasonably true to say that there has been no one who has written a successful account of a voyage round canals which has captured their essence, recorded the lives of those on the Cut and Bank and seized the popular imagination. But all this could change with the publication of Paul Gogartys The Water Road It is Gogartys ability to write intimately with no holds barred about all he sees and meets that makes the book a fascinating read.

Tim Coghlan, Canal & Riverboat

Published in the United Kingdom by
Portico Books
10 Southcombe Street
London
W14 0RA

An imprint of Anova Books Company Ltd
Copyright Paul Gogarty 2002

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

First eBook publication 2013
eBook ISBN 9781909396142

Also available as a paperback
Paperback ISBN 9781861056559

The paperback edition of this book can be ordered direct from the publisher at www.anovabooks.com

To Susanna, Larne and Max

A very big thanks to all those who feature in the book and to the dozens who dont the friends who visited me; my niece, Karen Norman, for typing up notes when my laptop crashed; Mike Constable from Thinktank Science Museum in Birmingham; Kevin Maslin, canal photographer; Dr Carl Chinn, Birmingham University lecturer, radio presenter, author, you-name-it; Mike Taylor, Birmingham city planner; Andrew Fielding, curator at Lion Salt Works in Marston; Tom Brownrigg, principal engineer at Anderton Boat Lift; Amanda Nash and Emma Middleton at the Black Country Museum; Nick Fazeley of the Dudley Canal Trust; Gary Taylor of Brindleyplace; Dennis Fink, Docklands Manager; Robin Smithett, photographer and author; Neil Stanton at Bulbourne Workshops; Tim Colghan at Braunston Marina; Heather Duncan, British Waterways Special Projects Officer in Tamworth; John Redmond of the Environment Agency; Willie Wilson at Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson; Tony Conder at the National Waterways Museum, Gloucester; John Potter of the Arnold Bennett Society; Mike Clarke, canal historian and author; all at the Sobriety Centre; Gay Blake-Roberts at Wedgwood; Headley Terry at the Etruscan Museum at Etruria Junction; Nigel Richardson at the Daily Telegraph; and GeoProjects and Nicholson for their guides.

Particular thanks go to Peter Woodley and the rest of the team at Adelaide Marine; Ed Fox, Eugene Baston and the other B.W. staff; Waterways Holidays U.K.; and to Nick Crane, a man for whom going the extra inch is just a starting point. I had so much help, inevitably someone has been overlooked for which I can only apologise. Last but not least, the biggest cheer is reserved for my family who had to put up with so much and for whom my journey also became their own.

Time is a gentle deity. Sophocles

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

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Life is a bath. All paddle about in its great pool. Seneca

The great majority of people feel that reality is terrible. Tschumi

The year unfolded apocalyptically enough. Forty days and forty nights was a mere shower compared to the wettest year since records began in 1766. While rural England was still reeling from B.S.E. and salmonella, over the winter engorged rivers broke their banks, homes flooded and livestock drowned. Seemingly overnight England had become Florida Keys without the sunshine.

Then, sixteen days before I was about to set sail on my four-month circumnavigation of the greatest national concentration of waterways cut solely for navigation in the world, another disaster hit. Foot-and-mouth was discovered in Northumberland and spread across the country like tabloid gossip. Virtually the entire canal network was closed down for the first time in more than two hundred years.

God clearly had it in for us pestilence, floods, plagues, hurricanes, hailstorms and train crashes (the Old Testament missed that one). They were all signs. A whale even washed up on a Sussex beach. What more proof was needed? The country was at the end of its rope. All that was missing was a great fire.

Funeral pyres were duly burning across the country as I eventually got under way six weeks behind schedule. Fields grazed by sheep for a thousand years were empty, tourism had fallen into the abyss and the stock market was about to crash. It was clearly the end of the world.

I slipped the moorings to the sinking island and sailed off into the parallel universe of the canals. If mainland England was currently damned to hell, the canal network was blessed to heaven. The inland waterways are the retreat of romantics and eccentrics, a water margin where the best of England is preserved and a new future is being dreamed.

There were many reasons for my 900-mile journey by traditional narrowboat. The renaissance of the canals and attendant resurrection of inner cities suggested this was the moment for a waterborne English pilgrimage. The turn of the millennium and my own half-century also required marking in some way. But perhaps the greatest motivation of all was a desire to understand a conundrum that had puzzled me on my brief earlier visits to the canal. Why is it that on some anonymous high street just fifty yards from the waterfront people hurry past each other seemingly persecuted by life, and yet those same people walking the canal towpath smile and greet everybody they meet? Sailing through Englands back door, over the next four months I hoped to discover the nature of that spell.

In September I would return home just in time to watch the Twin Towers crumble. The apocalypse was alive and kicking. There were lessons to be learned and Id seen the writing in the trembling water.