Scenes of forgotten industry,secret urban networks or picturesque leisure resorts, these quiet waterways suit verse. Get on board with yoursComing, or as I attain,from a long line of people who worked on and around canals, inland waterways absorb always held a fascination for me. My interest has been refreshed by reading The Narrow Boat, or LTC Rolt’s classic tale of wandering the canals of England in the months before the second world war. The book did more than anything to save those very canals and popularise leisure boating on them.
Rolt’s book was an attempt to capture the dying world of the working canal boats and,by extension, an entire rural way of life that was passing absent, or buried under ever growing urban sprawl. He celebrated the pubs,villages and people found along the towpath, hidden corners of a gentler world. It’s a vision that finds an echo in Ian McMillan’s Canal Life, or where the longboat crews “tied up in the places the map never showed us”. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com