Note: The contents of this blog are entirely my own notes written at the end of each day of the voyage. However, on a whim, I asked Claude AI to re-write it in the style of one of my all-time favourite authors - Robert Goddard. I had no idea if this was even possible, but here is the result.

Afloat on the Kennet & Avon

A Narrowboat Progress from Bath to Devizes and Back

August 2015

K. Copeland · De Twa Buken · Wijnjewoude, Friesland

I have thought about that week more often than I expected to. Not obsessively — I want to be clear about that — but in the way that certain journeys stay with you, surfacing at odd moments, in the particular quality of a grey afternoon light or the sound of water moving through a confined space. What I could not have known at the time, of course, was what the journey would come to represent. That is always the way of things. We do not choose which memories acquire weight.

The canal, I suppose, is a good place to discover this. Everything about it conspires against urgency. You move at walking pace or slower; the world narrows to a corridor of water, overhung trees, and the occasional startled heron lifting away from the bank with a sound like something tearing. It is not the England of motorways and business parks. It is something older, something that has been waiting patiently beneath the surface of things, and does not especially need you to notice it.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Every account must have a beginning. This one begins, as so many things do, in rain.

One: Bath

The flight from Groningen had been uneventful in the way that small twin-propeller aircraft always are — which is to say, it demanded rather more of one's composure than a larger aircraft would have done while offering considerably less in the way of reassurance. By the time we reached London Southend, then Paddington, then the Great Western Railway curving west through the dimming afternoon, I was already in that particular state of detachment that long journeys produce: neither entirely present nor yet arrived anywhere.

Bath received us at seven in the evening with its customary combination of Georgian grandeur and indifferent weather. The crescents and terraces stood in the grey light precisely as they had stood for two and a half centuries, and there was something faintly unnerving about them — all that accumulated stone, all those windows darkening in the failing light. The rain was not violent. It was simply thorough, and patient, and showed every sign of continuing indefinitely.

We spent the following morning on foot, which is the only honest way to know a city. I bought a rain jacket and an umbrella from a shop near the abbey, an act of capitulation that I made a point of not examining too closely. Janny and Anneke moved through the honey-coloured streets with the methodical curiosity of people who have agreed to enjoy themselves, and in this, at least, they succeeded.

The taxi driver who was supposed to take us to Sydney Wharf turned out to be a man of considerable confidence and limited geography. He had, it became clear after several minutes, conflated our destination with Canary Wharf in London — a misapprehension that no amount of correction appeared to disturb. I corrected him three times. On the third attempt, something in his expression suggested that he found my intervention vaguely impertinent. I stopped correcting him, and we walked the final kilometre. There are battles that are not worth winning.

Two: Englishcombe

The boat was called Englishcombe — number ninety-nine in the Anglo Welsh fleet, fifty-eight feet of dark green steel with a certain imperturbable solidity that I found, once I had spent some time with her, faintly reassuring. She had been everywhere on these canals and seen everything, and none of it had troubled her particularly. There is a kind of character in that.

She was handed over three hours later than the hire company had promised — the same three hours we would spend making progress that first evening, which is the kind of arithmetic that a canal holiday teaches you to accept. The instructor who completed the handover was a man in the final stages of an exhausting day, his relief at discovering that I had prior waterway experience genuine enough to be almost touching. He dispensed with the elementary briefing and focused instead on the propeller inspection plate, a detail he mentioned with an air of foreshadowing that I would come to appreciate.

Our fellow passengers that week included six Japanese gentlemen of retirement age, booked onto the adjacent vessel with cheerful intentions and impeccable collective efficiency. They had presented us, in a gesture of startling generosity, with a selection of add-water provisions of uncertain composition. I accepted with gratitude and asked no questions. Some knowledge is best deferred.

We moored that first night at Claverton. The steering had not been right all evening — something slack and imprecise in the response that I couldn't account for. I lay awake for a while in the narrow cabin, listening to the water moving against the hull, and decided to look at the propeller in the morning.

Three: What Was Found Below the Waterline

The propeller inspection plate is a two-part assembly, held in place by a clamp and a winch key. I removed it in the early morning while the canal was still quiet, inserting my arms into a space of approximate picnic-hamper dimensions, a borrowed breadknife in one hand, the other feeling along the submerged shaft in the slightly unpleasant way that such operations require.

The rope revealed itself immediately: coiled around both propeller and stern shaft with the thoroughness of something that had been there a while. Not our rope — that was the first thing I established, with the particular care one takes when the evidence might be misread. Someone else's rope, shed somewhere upstream, collected by the turning propeller and wound tight. I spent half an hour extracting it, acquiring several minor lacerations and a great deal of muddy canal water across the shoulders. When I ran the engine to test the improvement, the difference was immediate.

I have thought since about that rope — how long it had been there, what it had once been attached to, what sequence of events had left it loose in the water where the propeller found it. Canals accumulate things. They are patient about it. Nothing is lost along a waterway; it is merely waiting to be rediscovered.

Bradford on Avon, three hours further on, was a market town of handsome stone and considerable charm. We lunched, restocked, and returned to the water. The Barge Inn at Seend provided an excellent dinner that evening. Janny and Anneke expressed some surprise at the number of dogs occupying the interior of the establishment. I said nothing. There are things about England that are easier to absorb than explain.

Four: The Flight

I had read about Caen Hill before we left. Reading about it and standing at the bottom of it are not the same experience.

Twenty-nine locks. Sixteen of them in close succession — the famous flight, each chamber separated from the next by only a brief pound of water, the whole sequence dropping seventy-two feet in a mile and a half. It was built between 1794 and 1810 by men with shovels and wheelbarrows, the clay lining compacted into place by driving herds of cattle through it. I found myself standing on the towpath in the early morning, looking down the descending staircase of lock gates disappearing into the valley, and thinking about those men — what they understood and what they could not have understood about what they were building.

We joined forces that morning with Bob and Jackie and their son Alex, owners of a private boat half our length — a fact Alex deployed with quiet competence at every opportunity. The procedure became mechanical after the fourth or fifth lock: open paddles, fill chamber, open gates, enter, close, drain, exit, move on. Janny and Anneke worked the gates with a competence that, by the third hour, had begun to attract comments from other boaters. I steered and tried not to demonstrate, with too much visibility, how much of the actual work was being done by other people.

Seven hours. Thirty-four locks in total, on the ascent. We arrived in Devizes with the peculiar compound of exhaustion and elation that extreme physical effort sometimes produces — the sense of having briefly become the kind of people who do things like this. We marked the occasion appropriately. I did not sleep well that night, though I could not have said why.

Five: Devizes, and the Black Horse

Devizes on a Thursday is a market town performing itself with considerable conviction. I spent the morning browsing without any particular object, which is the only honest way to browse. The Canal and River Trust museum occupied an instructive hour: the original lock gates, displayed in their deteriorated state — timber rotted, metalwork defeated by a century of water — gave a different quality of understanding to the serviceable ones we had been forcing open all week. Someone had cared enough to restore all of this. It seemed worth knowing.

The Black Horse that evening was a different matter. The pub commanded a fine position above the canal — the sort of situation that an attentive landlord could have turned into something worth returning to. Somewhere along the way, a decision had apparently been made that the boating trade would come regardless of the effort made to deserve it. The food was poor, the atmosphere indifferent, the sense of opportunity declined apparent in every detail. I noted it and moved on. Some disappointments are simply information.

Six: The Return

We turned Englishcombe in the winding hole on Friday morning without incident and began back towards Bath at eight o'clock, as agreed with the boat moored behind us. The descent of Caen Hill took six hours where the ascent had taken seven. I attributed the difference to gravity and to knowing, this time, what we were doing.

Our companions on the descent were a family — parents working the gates, two boys steering — who had organised their labour with an efficiency that made the whole system run with unusual smoothness. The elder boy had a natural quality at the tiller that I watched with something I recognised, after a moment, as envy. Not of his age, exactly. Of his ease. He had not yet learned to think too hard about things he could already do.

Saturday brought a woman in a narrowboat who pulled ahead of us into a lock without acknowledgement, presumably having decided that the ordinary conventions of waterway courtesy did not apply to her particular circumstances. She waved as she closed the gate behind her. I waved back. There are confrontations that serve no purpose, and the canal teaches you, eventually, to recognise them.

Seven: The Tithe Barn and the Aqueduct

We breakfasted on Sunday morning at a restaurant above the canal in Bradford on Avon — the best meal of the week, as it turned out — and then walked out along the lanes towards the Great Tithe Barn.

The barn dates from the fourteenth century. It was built for the Abbess and nuns of Shaftesbury, to whom the land had been granted in 1001 by King Ethelred the Unready — a king whose name suggests that history has not dealt with him entirely kindly, and who perhaps deserves credit for the transactions his successors completed in stone and timber. Inside, fourteen bays of medieval carpentry stretched away in the dim light, each joint fitted without nails, the whole structure holding itself together across seven centuries by the logic of its own geometry. I stood in the middle of it for a while and felt the quality of time that old buildings can produce — not nostalgia, exactly, but something more neutral: the recognition that other people's lives were as fully real as yours, and that the difference is only one of sequence.

From Bradford, a short walk through the lanes brought us to Avoncliff and its aqueduct: a three-arched Georgian structure of 1804, carrying the canal twenty-seven feet above the River Avon. The effect, standing on the towpath, was of mild spatial dislocation — the canal at mid-height, the valley floor below, the two connected by nothing but an eighteenth-century engineer's confidence and several thousand tonnes of Bath stone. A passing boatman told us, with the satisfaction of experience hard won, about the submerged concrete shelf where the original clay lining had been replaced: the place to avoid when mooring. He had learned this by grounding on it. He was glad to spare us the same.

Eight: Lacock

The George Inn at Lacock was everything the Black Horse had declined to be. Ancient, well-proportioned, possessed of a kitchen that appeared to take its responsibilities seriously. The place had the particular quality of somewhere that had not yet decided it needed to try harder; it was simply itself, with the confidence of several centuries of practice. We ate well, drank adequately, and sat by the fire for longer than we had intended.

Janny and Anneke fell into conversation with two other boaters at the bar — a retired schoolteacher and her husband, who had been travelling the English waterways for thirty years and spoke about them the way that people speak about places they have come to love without quite being able to explain why. I listened more than I spoke. There are people who have understood something about a thing that you have only just begun to understand, and the intelligent response is to pay attention.

Nine: The Return of Englishcombe

We returned Englishcombe to Sydney Wharf on Monday morning at eight-thirty. The handover took twenty minutes. The man receiving the boat mentioned, without apparent irony, that he had two years left to work before he planned to retire onto a narrowboat permanently. I told him that two years was not very long. I meant it as reassurance. I am not certain he took it that way.

What followed — seven hours on the M4 and M25 in persistent rain, a hire car collected from a firm that had apparently decided Bank Holiday staffing was a matter of limited concern, a GPS that declined to function until Janny's iPhone stepped in as a replacement — was the kind of journey that restores, by contrast, one's affection for the thing one has just left. The motorway service stations confirmed views about the country's relationship with food and shelter that I had been hoping were unfair. The Holiday Inn at London Southend Airport was, against expectation, genuinely good: a fact I note here in the spirit of honest accounting.

I spent three hours in the departure lounge reading further about canal history. Janny observed that this was either genuine enthusiasm or the early stage of an obsession, and that the distinction might not matter. She was right on both counts.

Coda: What the Canal Teaches

The Kennet and Avon was more or less abandoned by the 1950s. The Caen Hill flight had ceased operation entirely. For thirty years, volunteers worked to restore it — clearing the channels, rebuilding the gates, relining the pounds, attending to the thousand small structural failures that accumulate when a waterway is left to manage its own decline. The canal reopened in 1990. The people who did that work are owed something by everyone who uses it now. I am not sure that debt is adequately acknowledged.

The Japanese gentlemen, we learned towards the end of the week, had chosen a shorter route — Bradford on Avon and back — reserving their next holiday for the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales, which carries the Llangollen Canal one hundred and twenty-six feet above the River Dee and which is, by any measure, a more vertiginous proposition than Avoncliff. We told them we intended to go there too, which was not a plan when I said it but became one shortly afterwards. These things have a way of arranging themselves.

I said at the beginning that I have thought about that week more than I expected to. What I did not say — what I was still trying to understand when I started writing — is why. There was nothing dramatic about it, in the ordinary sense. No revelation, no turning point, no event that could be held up as the reason the memory has weight. Only the water, and the pace, and the slow passage through a landscape that had been waiting — with the same patience it always shows — to be noticed.

There will be a next time. That much, at least, is certain.

— K. Copeland, Wijnjewoude, Friesland. September 2015.