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Continuing his journey across the Midlands via its canals, our author finds eccentric characters, moving memorials and quaint villages
Paul Miles is following in the wake of narrowboating pioneer LTC Rolt, retracing a journey he made – and wrote about – more than 80 years ago, reflecting on how England has changed, and considering why so many people still find pleasure on the country’s canals. This is the third part of his journey. You can read the first instalment here and the second here.
From Leicester, the Soar navigation twists and turns prettily, fringed with willow and alder. Much of it is still “a scene that would have delighted Constable”, as LTC Rolt wrote in 1939. However, below Cossington Lock is no longer a pleasant spot to moor. The A6 is noisy and even the minor road across the navigation is busy – “the death-dealing turmoil of the modern motor road”, wrote Rolt; compared to which, “the canal or river is a veritable sanctuary”. This sanctuary was teeming with police.
A dozen members of the Leicestershire constabulary were in training, “practising rescues”, said one on the towpath while some of his colleagues were floating in the water, being thrown lines. “With all the floods we’re getting these days, water rescues are becoming a bigger part of our job. February was crazy.”
I cruised on through a mostly sylvan serpentine scene until Sileby lock, where I moored next to another narrowboat so covered in pot plants the boat disappeared under a canopy of bright blooms. “People don’t see me coming when I’m cruising, they just see flowers,” said Stephen, its owner, who explained how his journey to becoming a full-time live-aboard boater began when “I sold my house by accident. I was drunk and put it on [a website] and in the morning I had an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
The next day, after just an hour’s cruise, enough to charge the batteries and heat the hot water, I moored in Barrow-upon-Soar. The summer holidays were over and there were no customers for the fleet of wacky vessels opposite the Navigation Inn: pedal-powered swans and dragons festooned with Union Flag bunting and one aluminium motor launch featuring a Hindu shrine and a mannequin dressed in a sari.
It was here where Tom and Angela hired a rowing boat and rowed around the unnavigable loop of the river by Quorn Hall, finishing with a pint of mild at the Navigation Inn “overlooking the white foaming fall of the weir”. I did something similar and took my paddleboard around that same loop, carrying it down to the river from the two-day visitor moorings. The first part was narrow and overgrown with fallen trees and flowering sedge, but before long it widened.
Narrowboats had nosed their way in to tie against trees, so far up this “unnavigable” loop that I doubt they will ever leave. One looked abandoned, slowly sinking. Another was fresh from the manufacturers, being fitted out by its owner. On the opposite bank were smart houses of Quorn village. The water was clear with tresses of ribbony weed undulating in the current, catching a golden hint of evening light. Then I hauled my board out of the water and walked up around the lock to paddle back to The Navigation Inn. In the pub, a pint of Derby mild was not on the menu. “No-one makes mild any more,” said Emma, one of the bar staff.
In Loughborough I time-travelled back to Tom and Angela’s era on a steam train. The Great Central Railway bills itself as Britain’s only mainline heritage railway. I chuffed between the lovingly restored stations of Loughborough Central and North Leicester, a return journey of 16 miles that cost a pricey £22. A quarter of a tons of coal is burnt for each return journey, I was told.
While they were in Loughborough, Tom and Angela visited “the works of Messrs John Taylor, a small unpretentious foundry, famous the world over as the birthplace of bells”. The foundry, operating since 1859, is still in business and open to the public, although tours are limited to Wednesdays and there is no promise you will witness a casting. It was Thursday when I moored up, so I missed out.
Had I been more organised, I could have enjoyed a different chiming experience: listening to the 47 bells of the 101-year-old carillon tower in Queen’s Park. The purpose-built tower is a war memorial, “surely the finest in the country”, wrote Rolt. And just as in Rolt’s day, “the bells are played twice a week throughout the summer months” (Thursdays and Sundays, 1pm) as well as on Remembrance Sunday and Christmas Eve. Amazingly, the town still “boasts a public official whose office is unique in England: the town carilloner”. The incumbent is Caroline Sharpe – who, coincidentally, lives on a historic narrowboat. She expertly plays a chunky baton keyboard using her balled fists instead of fingers to hit the keys that swing the clappers on bells weighing up to four tons each. In the end, I watched and listened to Caroline play her last summer performance from the comfort of my boat, as she broadcast it live online.
While moored below Bishop’s Meadow lock, on the outskirts of Loughborough, a man in Canal & River Trust (CRT) blue cruised past in a strange contraption: a kind of floating forklift. He had been clearing the navigation of floating pennywort, he said, an invasive species that has been a problem since it was introduced to the UK in the 1980s by aquarium owners. It can clog the waterway, hindering navigation and the operation of locks.
As the sun sank lower, a man in an electric launch silently cruised towards me from the same direction. He had a passenger: a woman in a summer dress drinking a flute of champagne, sitting under the shade of a canvas awning. We waved at each other. Wherever was ahead in my journey seemed to promise riches. Sure enough, little Normanton on Soar was delightful, with grand homes by the river and a church “so close upon the bank that it ponders its image in the water”. Rolt wrote: “The numerous slender spires of the village churches are a feature of the soft river scenery between Loughborough and the Trent.”
He is still right about that but since Narrow Boat was published, the hulking cooling towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station and pylons marching across fields have been added to the scenery. Built in the 1960s, the coal-fired power station was days away from being decommissioned when I cruised past. “Are you looking forward to it being demolished?” I asked a man in a residential mooring, a backdrop of eight wide-bellied, wide-mouthed concrete structures behind his narrowboat. “No! They’re part of the landscape now,” he replied. “Our modern industrial heritage.”
Despite barely a breath of wind, there was a flotilla of dinghies doing their best to race and I had to give way to them at the junction of the Soar and Trent. Rolt had the same experience, although when he cruised through this waterways’ crossroads there were also “numerous holiday-makers in minute pedal-driven craft darting hither and thither like so many water-fleas with a joyous abandon that cared nothing for the rules of navigation”. This great watery junction is the centre of canal engineer James Brindley’s Grand Cross, that made it possible for boats to voyage inland between the Humber, Mersey, Thames and Severn; a visionary project that was complete by 1790. I moored at the last space on a pontoon in front of one of two pubs, Trent Lock, busy with day-trippers at outdoor tables.
For the next two days a cold wind blew up, making the Trent, over 160ft wide here, choppy and uninviting. Eventually, with my father aboard for the ride, we set off upriver to Sawley lock. The reach above the lock is where Rolt despaired at the sight of “cabin cruisers moored head to stern along the banks, whose grass, bruised and flattened, was bestrewn with an untidy litter of paper bags, empty tins, orange peel and the embers of picnic fires.” He added: “Crews… lolled on decks to the accompaniment of the inevitable gramophone.” Today, the fibreglass cabin cruisers are crammed in even more tightly, moored on finger pontoons.
We cruised under the M1, lorries high enough for drivers to glimpse the narrowboats. We soon reached another watery junction, joining the mouth of the Derwent and “between the converging rivers, the entrance of the Trent & Mersey Canal, England’s first coast-to-coast waterway, and James Brindley’s masterpiece… the central connecting artery of the whole system of inland waterways”. Brindley’s name for it was The Grand Trunk. This canal had, in the words of one historic commentator, “chained seas together”.
Shardlow village, “the eastern terminus of Brindley’s great canal”, impressed Rolt with its warehouses that were “a thing of beauty”. Today, the village still proudly conserves its built heritage and is a popular spot for photographers and painters. One warehouse is now a lock-side pub and restaurant, The Clock Warehouse. Sadly the staff seem ignorant of the building’s history. “Something about boats,” said one. “Lots of people ask.”
The Canal Tavern, where Rolt enjoyed listening to the locals sing, is now a private home. However, another pub he mentions, The Malt Shovel Inn, with its “curious projecting gable end and round-headed doorways”, is still there, canal-side. The chips are excellent and the walls are covered in old photographs and documents about the original malting house and brewery that stood in Rolt’s day but have since been demolished to make way for housing. Landlady Lena Kelleher, originally from Hackney, has been at the helm for 18 years. The tables are all board games with playing pieces available at the bar. Lena has tried to revive Shardlow’s “famous greasy pole” competition, a photograph of which hangs on a wall; men bashing each other with sacks of hay as they sit astride a pole over the canal, but, as with a proposed annual raft race, the ideas have been vetoed by CRT. “Health and safety,” scoffed Lena.
In Burton upon Trent, the Rolts enjoyed a brewery tour, indulging Tom’s passion for beer. The town itself had “dirty streets” where brewers’ drays, lorries and puffing locomotives carried casks. Gone are the drays and there are no brewery tours in this town that grew famous for its ale thanks to the unique quality of water. Even the National Brewery Centre has closed. “All they care about is shareholders and making lager,” said a drinker in a tiny bar, The Weighbridge Inn, referring to the private company that previously hosted the centre. The drinkers in this former coal yard were downing pints of porter and bitter but, again, there was no mild, Tom’s favourite tipple.
While mooring adjacent to Shobnall playing fields was pleasant – trees, grass and relative peace – Burton upon Trent offered little apart from barbers and vape shops and police in attendance at a disturbance in a nail bar. The town’s main attraction – number one on Tripadvisor – is Claymills Victorian Pumping Station. Until the 1960s, this steam-powered Victorian creation pumped up to five million gallons of sewage daily. Built in the 1880s, initially to pump brewery waste rather than let it pollute the Trent, there are 33 restored working steam engines of all sizes including four enormous beam engines. With cogs and pistons and nuts and bolts on such an enormous scale, the place reminded me of a scene from the 1927 film Metropolis. Steampunk fans would love it.
The canal continues adjacent to the A38, where Rolt despaired at the “tawdry ugliness which the motor car has brought to the English road” and the “mania of hurry which has infected our unhappy civilisation”. Yet in 1939, despite Rolt’s despair, he also witnessed a farmer bringing traffic to a standstill as he herded cattle across the road. There would be no chance of that today. Lorries and cars hurtle along a dual carriageway. Thankfully the scene is mostly screened from the canal by trees.
Late in the day, I arrived at the lock below the village of Alrewas and moored on the lock landings overnight as a harvest moon rose in a pink wreathed sky. Rolt dismissed the village as “beleaguered by council housing” but I found it endearingly quaint. The National Memorial Arboretum is just a 15-minute bike ride away. I visited for a morning, wandering the 400 or so memorials in this riverside park where 25,000 trees have been planted since 1996. There are already over 16,000 names on the armed forces memorial for those who have died since the end of the Second World War. The design includes space for 15,000 more.
Trees in the arboretum – few of which are labelled – bore signs of autumn. Back at the boat, hips and haws were bright red and crab apples bobbed on the canal’s surface. Rosebay willowherb along the banks was full of soft seed. This plant flourished in post-blitz London, thriving in burnt-out bomb sites. It has gone from being rare in the 19th century to being everywhere today, its light-as-air seeds spreading with the railways.
I cruised on, past The Swan at Fradley Junction – where the Rolts stopped for another pint of mild. A couple of drinkers in their 70s told me how they used to drink it. “It was cheaper than bitter. We used to mix it half and half,” she said. “The landlord used to let the overflow slops go into the barrel of mild.” No wonder it was cheap.
It was when voyaging away from The Swan that the Rolts noticed that the canal smelt awful. “It was positively nauseating, the water black and foul, the banks and lock-sides covered with a noxious slime.” They soon discovered the cause: a milk factory on the edge of Cannock Chase, “belching black smoke” and pouring “reeking, milky” effluent into the canal.
Thankfully, today there is no such factory in sight, just birch trees and bracken morphing into oaks and gorse: a corridor of heath habitat preserved by the canal. Nearing Rugeley, though, there is a sorry-looking factory. Its windows are broken and you might think it abandoned but for strip lighting inside. This is the “large sanitary pottery” that Rolt mentions: Armitage Shanks.
I didn’t tarry in Rugeley, which Rolt described as “one of the drabbest and dreariest of small towns we had ever seen”. An email advice from CRT warned of an emergency lock closure ahead. So onwards I cruised, crossing the River Trent on a fine stone aqueduct – it was said that Brindley made “ships float over valleys” – then winding through fields to Colwich lock, where a man from CRT was measuring up the lock-beam for a new steel brace that he would manufacture in the morning to overcome a broken tenon joint. My initial panic that the lock might be out of action for weeks was unfounded. It would be patched up and reopened within 24 hours; a temporary repair until the total replacement of the rotting two-ton oak lock gate, scheduled for winter 2025-26.
“We can only make 80 gates a year in our workshops,” said the man from CRT. Over a network with nearly 1,600 locks, that is a slow rate of replacement. No wonder an increasing number of gates have temporary fixes that endure for years. The funding of our inland waterways is in peril. There are many boaters who fear that after all the hard work of restoring them (largely thanks to volunteers enthused by reading Narrow Boat) our inland waterways are entering a new era of decline.
I moored near Shugborough Hall, with owls hooting from the wooded bank opposite. I was almost at Great Haywood Junction, 138 miles and 110 locks from Tooley’s boatyard in Banbury, following the route taken by the Rolts on Cressy.
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