“Once upon a time, not so very many years ago, it was possible to travel all over England, north, south, east and west, by river and canal; there was not a county you could not visit, hardly a town you could not reach by water, if you liked and if you were not (and what lover of boats and rivers ever was or will be?) in any particular hurry to get there.”
William Bliss, The Heart of England by Waterway (1933)
This is the end. I can’t go any further. I’ve come as far as possible; to the northernmost limit; the same latitude as Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula and parts of Alaska. It’s taken me years to reach here by boat. But in case you wonder, I’m not floating in pack ice in the Arctic; I’m in northern Lancashire, on the border with Cumbria at 54 degrees north, at today’s northernmost limit of the navigable network of inland waterways of England and Wales.
I have travelled here at 3mph in my floating home – my steel narrowboat – a peculiarly British vessel, just 6ft 10 wide and 55ft long. I live aboard, a nomad of the inland waterways, constantly cruising an extensive network of rivers and canals. Rippling reflections of sunlight on water dance across my wooden ceiling. My home moves when I walk around and when the wind blows. An increasing number of us are making our homes on the water, our garden more than 2,000 miles of flower-edged towpath, where horses and donkeys once hauled boats by rope. I lose track of how many miles of canals and rivers I have cruised and the hundreds of locks I have been through. I have no permanent mooring. I am a “continuous cruiser”. Home might be Yorkshire one month and Gloucestershire the next, although that would be going too fast.
Five years ago, when I first stepped aboard my narrowboat – the only home I’ve ever owned – I pored over an Inland Waterways map of Great Britain. Rather than roads, it is the canals and navigable rivers that are prominent on this map. It is a shock at first to see the otherwise familiar presented so differently: the Midlands and the northern parts of the country so dominant. It is like examining a quirky medical diagram of the body which highlights chakras instead of veins and muscle – not a map that most people would take seriously as a means of navigating their way around the country.
But since that day in Oxfordshire, the map too big to open fully on any available floor space, I’ve wanted to reach here: the Lancaster Canal. This northernmost stretch of the joined inland waterways network of England and Wales wends its way past Morecambe, where, on the map, coastline and canal almost merge.
The canal reaches a place called Tewitfield, from where it continues further northwards but now as a dotted line, meaning “under restoration”, all the way to Kendal, where the map is brown and empty and reads “Cumbrian Mountains”. So wild, so northern, so distant. At least for a southerner.
The Lancaster Canal is one of our more recent canals, constructed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Until fairly recently, it lay orphaned from the rest of the waterways network, separated by the River Ribble and its wide estuary. The plan had been for an aqueduct across the river linking this canal to Wigan and its coalfields. This proved to be ambitious and costly and so, as a temporary measure, goods were transferred from one canal to the other by rail on a horse-drawn tram. This stopgap continued for so long that, eventually, the aqueduct wasn’t needed at all: the canal’s usage had been usurped by steam trains.
The Lancaster Canal languished as an isolated stretch of human-made waterway. In the past few decades, however, after a multi-million pound Millennium Commission project, a watery route to this remote canal was constructed. The Millennium Ribble Link, opened in 2002, is the first new inland waterway to be completed in Britain for 100 years.
The Millennium Ribble Link is not a canal (a human-made channel) as such, rather it is a navigation (rivers that have been made navigable). It is a route that many narrowboat owners will not even consider doing.
“You must be mad,” said one to me the day before I was due to set off. “Narrowboats have flat bottoms and are designed for shallow canals with no flow, not to go out to a tidal estuary that is practically the open sea.”
To get to the Lancaster Canal, boats leave the Leeds & Liverpool Canal through a lock at the Lancashire village of Tarleton. From here, they cruise down the tidal River Douglas for four miles before entering the Ribble estuary, up which they cruise for two miles and then turn left to enter a small tidal tributary that has been made navigable with the addition of a sea gate and eight locks ascending to the Lancaster Canal, where a junction has been constructed near Preston. Usage of the Millennium Ribble Link is tightly controlled by the Canal & River Trust (CRT). Boaters have to book a passage well in advance. The tide has to be high enough and weather conditions favourable. It was to be my first experience of what some call “extreme narrowboating”.
I arrive at the approach to Tarleton lock at 08.30, my appointed time. The lock-keeper strolls along the towpath and informs me that the strength of the wind is “borderline”.
“If when you get to the Ribble you decide that you want to turn back, that’s fine,” he says, as wind strafes the cow parsley, laying it almost horizontal. If I had been on my boat alone, as I am usually, I think I would have chickened out at this stage but I have Dave aboard. Dave is a mechanic I met in Manchester, where he lives on a narrowboat flying the skull and crossbones with his girlfriend and his rottweiler, Dexter. Dave did a major repair job on my engine, involving some rags, a piece of steel and him angle-grinding his spanner to fit a nut. Dave, Dexter and I have spent the past three days cruising from Manchester to reach here in time for my booked passage.
The sun is making an appearance between clouds, diminishing the malevolence of the wind. We’ve taken pot plants, wheelbarrow and bikes off the roof and stored them in the boat, where Dexter now barely has room to lie down. Dave has checked coolant, oil, greaser. We’ve plugged the scuppers. The anchor is tied on, ready to be deployed if – please God no – the engine fails and we start to drift out to sea. We have donned lifejackets, made sure mobile phones are fully charged and have binoculars and the CRT map to hand (although it is barely legible and almost useless). We have studied the rivers on Google Earth, satellite images that were taken at low tide so we can see where channels lie in the thick mud.
We share the river lock with a fibreglass cruiser, which, once we have dropped level with the river and the lock keeper has opened the gates, exits ahead of us. Dave, who lives on a narrowboat in a marina but has never cruised it anywhere, is fizzing with excitement. It feels like a long time that we’re cruising against the incoming tide down the River Douglas as it gets wider and wider, full to the brim of its green flanks, where geese stare. This river was first made navigable in the early 18th century to enable coasters to carry coal down the Ribble estuary and then across the sea to Ireland – a destination we hope not to end up at today.
The sky is large, the wind blowing strongly, waves sloshing at the bow. I’m at the tiller, wrapped up in hat, gloves and several layers. The whole boat judders frequently. “It’s like when you’re on a ferry,” reassures Dave when I wonder whether the body-reverberating vibration is a result of him tinkering with the engine. We join the tigerish waters of the Ribble estuary. The water is wider still, perhaps half a mile across, and stretches westwards to a sun-glinting open horizon, with no land in sight.
I steer us around the Astland Lamp marker post, and we head eastwards. Now the wind is behind us and its feel and sound are completely different, less ominous. I feel more confident. I cruise near the green navigational marker buoys. The northern shoreline is frothed with driftwood. I look through binoculars and there, ahead, is the green lamp that marks the entrance to Savick Brook. I overshoot the mouth to follow its channel and the boat leans heavily in the current. I grip the tiller tightly and my yelp is blown away on the wind, but the boat rights itself quickly and we cruise into the brook’s mouth.
Never has a nondescript, muddy stream felt such a welcome haven. We are safe. We have made it to the other side without drifting out to sea or capsizing. We lash up with the others of our convoy on a pontoon in a reed-edged pound and have time to make a cup of tea. When the last boat – a little narrowboat towing a tender – has joined us and we are all rafted together like eider ducks at sea, the CRT staff close a sea gate behind us and we set off one by one to cruise up the twisty, squelchy brook through the locks to the canal. We are mudskippers hopping over the mud escaping the retreating tide.
Six hours after leaving Tarleton we exit the top lock (backwards!) into the small basin on the Lancaster Canal. We have arrived, but there’s no time for celebrating. We have a sandwich and Dave gathers his stuff together from among the disorder of the boat’s interior and we cycle off down the towpath to the train station.
“It’s been magic, mate,” he says as we stand on the platform waiting for his train to Manchester. “Call me when you’re coming back across.” Our journey from Manchester to here has taken three days by boat. He’ll be back home in 50 minutes.
On the waterways it helps not to have a deadline to be anywhere specific. Days turn into weeks, weeks to months. Usually I move on when I feel like it or when the toilet needs emptying or the water tank needs filling or after the permitted maximum stay of two weeks has elapsed, whichever is the sooner. Until I find another spot that appeals. The ideal is a peaceful, rural place with country views, no other boats nearby and not too shaded.
I crossed the Ribble in early May. It is now July, the days already shortening. Tewitfield is only 41 miles from Preston, with no locks, but I’m never one to hurry. So here I am, at the joined canal system’s northern limit in England and Wales. It is glorious here, the towpath splashed with blues and purples, a tangle of flowers – clover, vetch, scabious and pink-tinged yarrow.
The Preston to Tewitfield stretch of the Lancaster Canal was opened on 22 November 1797. Horse-drawn boats full of local dignitaries and red-coated guardsmen set off from Preston at 9.30am to the accompaniment of artillery firing over Lancaster Moor. Crowds thronged to see the boats being towed along, marvelling at this new, modern transport infrastructure.
By 1819 the canal had been extended to Kendal, 14 miles further north, leading to an economic boom in the Lake District town. The Lancaster and Kendal Canal, as it was known for a time, was called the “Black & White”, as its main cargoes were coal and limestone, although boats also carried gunpowder, wool and rocks. By 1840, 617,000 imperial tons of cargo was being transported along the Lancaster Canal each year.
When, in the first half of the 19th century, the railways came along, the decline of the canals began. The last cargo boat to pass through Lancaster Canal’s quarter-mile long Hincaster tunnel did so in 1944.
In the decade of my birth – the 1960s – the motorway era was also born. Bulldozers pushed their way right across the canal to make way for the M6 and its junctions and bypasses. Beyond the rude damming of the canal by a road embankment at Tewitfield, eight abandoned locks climb up a hill, the only locks on the entire 55-mile stretch between Preston and Kendal.
They still flow with water but the lock gates are no more. There is a beautiful melancholy about it all, like visiting a ruined abbey. The water doesn’t know that it is no longer being put to use to lift boats up the hill. It rushes through the empty locks, a series of waterfalls, the pounds between them full of water lilies, marsh marigolds and irises.
Until the 19th century, no one would travel hundreds of miles in a day as many of those speeding past on the motorway are now doing. Life was generally lived at 3mph: walking pace and the average speed of a horse-drawn boat. When the railways were being built, some critics theorised that passengers would die from excessive speed, human bodies unable to withstand 30mph.
Slow travel is something of a movement now, bolstered by the trend for mindfulness. Narrowboat holidays are booming, fuelled in part by TV documentaries and books about the canals. A two-hour “slow TV” experience of a narrowboat journey in real time, filmed from the front of a boat, with no narration, attracted over half a million viewers when it aired on BBC4 in 2015.
To say the Northern Reaches – as the 14-mile stretch north of Tewitfield is called – is “unnavigable” is not entirely true. At the village of Crooklands there is one small and solitary narrowboat owned by the Lancaster Canal Trust that cruises along a discrete four-mile length. The Trust is campaigning for the full restoration of the canal to Kendal. Tens of millions of pounds are needed to squeeze the watery highway under roads and motorway and restore locks.
North of Crooklands the canal is dry. It is full of nettles and ash trees or ploughed and growing with wheat, its embankments still visible. Stone bridges arch over a grassy gully; a “winding hole” (where boats turn around) is now a grass-banked amphitheatre. A solitary swallow swoops low over what was the bed of the canal, as if with some distant memory of its wateriness. A tortoiseshell butterfly flits between clover and grasses.
The stretch into Kendal is prosaic, the ghost of the canal barely visible by now. All that remains is a tarmac path next to a brambly overgrown ditch. Its very northernmost point – where sloops and barges once unloaded their cargoes – is now the site of a household waste recycling facility on a lane called Canal Head.
• This article was amended on 18 February 2024 to correct the caption on the photograph of Crooklands. The village is in Cumbria, not south of Lancaster. Two image captions were further amended on 28 February 2024. One had said “Lock No 1 of the Lancaster Canal at Galgate” but should have said that the location was lock No 1 of the Glasson branch of the Lancashire Canal. Another caption read “The historic Leeds & Liverpool Canal at Tarleton, where a lock joins it to the Lancaster Canal”, but should have identified the spot as the first lock on the Rufford Branch of the Leeds Liverpool Canal near Lathom.
