LOWER HEYFORD, England — When you’re puttering through the English countryside at 3 mph, you notice all sorts of things you don’t see along the motorways.
Hares bound through the fields, thatched-roof cottages stand solid and homey, frisky newborn lambs tumble over one another and country squires in their Wellingtons whistle their Labrador retrievers back to the manor house.
These little tableaux of English country life unfolded continually as I motored at a decidedly unhurried pace along the meandering Oxford Canal. I was aboard a very long, very slender craft called a “narrowboat,” a uniquely British vessel that once transported coal along a vast and sprawling network of canals and now carries vacationers and live-aboard retirees.
Those canals and navigable waterways, the interstate highways of the Industrial Revolution, still total more than 2,000 miles and stretch from Yorkshire to Kent. (Scotland and Wales have their own networks.) A week dawdling along one of them is a journey back to a timeless, pastoral England, through a landscape of wandering hedgerows, ivy-covered mills and thatched-roof villages that look like Thomas Kinkade paintings come to life.
My sister, Kate Paap, who planned the trip, chose the Oxford Canal, one of the oldest in England and by consensus among boaters one of the prettiest. In the ripe words of Michael Pearson, whose “Canal Companion” book became our daily guide: “The Oxford Canal slices through the grain of the countryside like someone cutting an apple pie. But instead of oozing blackberry and apple filling, a rural landscape of shallow valleys and modest rises is exposed.”
Not much I can add to that.
Stretching 77 miles from Oxford to Coventry, the canal traverses the green heart of England, skirting the edge of the Cotswolds and pushing up into the Midlands. A marvel of Georgian engineering, it was built in the late 1770s, just as those ungrateful colonists across the Atlantic were causing trouble. The waterway follows the contours of the land, winding lazily this way and that and sometimes snaking back on itself. It’s not the way to go if you’re in a rush.
A direct train out of London’s Paddington Station deposited us an hour later in the village of Lower Heyford, the base for Oxfordshire Narrowboats, where our home for the week, the Lord Nelson, was waiting at the dock.
Richard Chapman, the company’s engineer, offered a quick checkout, pointing out various emergency cutoff valves and bilge pumps, none of which I understood. Luckily, we had some ringers with us. Kate’s husband, Fred, his sister, Ingrid, and her husband, Frans, were on hand. Ingrid and Frans own a large sailboat in Holland and were adept at all the things that flummoxed us landlubbers, like tying knots. It was reassuring to see Frans nod wisely at each knob and hand-crank Chapman discussed.
I did, however, spend all week fretting about something called the weed hatch. A plaque next to the engine cover read: “Make sure the weed hatch is firmly in place before starting the engine, or the boat will sink.” In the manual Chapman gave us, there was an attention-getting picture of a sunken narrowboat with the caption: “It has been suggested that the weed hatch had not been properly secured. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.” I still don’t have the slimmest idea what a weed hatch is, but I am happy to report that ours never gave us a moment of trouble.
The Oxford Canal has 42 locks, and building them was sweaty, backbreaking work. As a result, the 18th-century diggers and bricklayers didn’t make them an inch wider than they had to. A standard English lock is only 7 feet across. Hence the name for the craft that pass through them: narrowboats. (When approaching a lock, someone has to tie up the boat and walk ahead to make sure no one is coming the other way.)
The Lord Nelson was only 6 feet, 6 inches wide and a full 70 feet long, roughly the dimensions of a small submarine. It allegedly slept eight people, but only if two of them bedded down on benches in the galley.
Inside were three double beds and two bathrooms with showers and toilets — one of which was backed up for much of the cruise — plus a tiny galley with a four-burner gas stove, small refrigerator and sink, and a dining table with benches that could fit six people eating shoulder to shoulder.
Brown-and-white cows peered stupidly over the tops of hedgerows as we sputtered past old stone barns and fields of mustardlike rapeseed in the valley of the River Cherwell. As the willow-lined canal wound back and forth, it sometimes seemed as if we were on an English version of Disneyland’s Jungle Boat Cruise, with sheep and magpies appearing around each bend instead of hippos and giraffes.
Steering a 70-foot-long, pencil-shaped boat takes some getting used to. I’d give the tiller a little push, and nothing would happen immediately. So I’d push it farther and farther, until the boat sluggishly responded to my original command. By this point I’d given it way too much tiller, and instead of a gentle bend to the left we would come about rather abruptly and bash into the muddy bank, scattering a gaggle of geese. Too late to avoid this, I’d shove the tiller all the way in the other direction, setting up an inevitable collision a few moments later with the far bank.
After 30 jarring minutes of this, I was starting to get the hang of it. Based on my experience with a smaller canal boat in southern France, I’m fairly confident that after an hour I would have become — well, if not competent, at least less of a menace to bridges, canal banks, other boats and geese.
The Oxford Canal ran parallel to the Cherwell until — well, I’ll just let Pearson tell it: “Having played coquettishly with the canal’s affections since Cropredy, the Cherwell acquires carnal knowledge by Aynho Weir Lock as the channel flows directly across the canal — shameless hussy.”
Half a dozen times each day we’d come to a lock. These devices for lifting and lowering boats on rivers and canals were invented by Leonardo da Vinci when he was engineer to the Duke of Milan, and nobody has been able to significantly improve on the design since then. Those on the Oxford Canal are refurbished regularly but have used the same technology since the late 1700s.
Locks on some of England’s other waterways are manned by lock keepers who do all the work, so I was a little worried to hear that on the Oxford Canal boaters operate the locks by themselves. It turned out to be simple and easy. As we approached a lock, we’d tie up along the side of the canal and Ingrid, Kate and I would hop off and use special cranks to fill or drain the lock, as necessary. We’d open the big gates, pushing the enormous oaken arms with our backs, and once the Lord Nelson had eased snugly inside we’d close the gates and reverse the process. Start to finish, it took about 20 minutes.
There were, however, some perils. At one lock, the boat jolted sharply — we never figured out why — and half our plates spilled out of the cabinet and shattered on the floor. More seriously, as Ingrid rushed to hop back onto the boat as it left the second-to-the-last lock, she slipped and tumbled down some brick stairs into the canal, fracturing her elbow and badly gashing her leg. Locks aren’t inherently dangerous, but it’s important to be careful around them.
For a change of pace, a couple of us would occasionally hop off the boat and walk the towpath, where teams of stout horses once pulled coal-laden barges. The Lord Nelson cruised so slowly that we could keep up a conversation with those on board.
At the old market town of Banbury, we took advantage of a canal-side brick warehouse that has been transformed into a shopping mall to stock the boat’s pantries.
At night we’d moor up in one of the idyllic hamlets lining the canal. My favorite was Cropredy, the site of a fierce and bloody battle during England’s civil war in 1644, but now a picturesque cluster of thatched-roof homes made of honey-colored Cotswold stone, which J.B. Priestley called “faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them.” We wandered the narrow, winding lanes, pausing to admire the exquisite gardens or inspect the leaning headstones in the village graveyard before calling in at the Red Lion pub, which has been serving travelers since the 1600s.
Nearly half the narrowboats we saw along the canal were not holiday rentals but the permanent residences of British pensioners. It was easy to spot them: The roofs were festooned with flower gardens — complete with gnomes — stacks of firewood, bicycles and satellite TV dishes. At a lock below Napton-on-the-Hill, I met Ray and Chris Barnfield, 57 and 56, respectively, who have been living on their 60-foot narrowboat with their bearded collie and black lab for the past four years. Ray, who managed a timber-products factory in Somerset for years, said a heart attack convinced him to change his lifestyle.
“You just get to the point where you realize that what you’re doing isn’t worth it,” he told me. “We were spending all our lives gathering stuff around us we didn’t need.” The couple sold their house and bought a narrowboat for 32,000 pounds (about $54,000). They’ve lived aboard it ever since, puttering up to the Lake District and down to Sussex, never in a hurry to get anywhere. Winters can be a bit tough, they said — the canals freeze, trapping them in ice like Shackleton — so they just moor their boat and go visit friends in a warmer corner of Britain.
“That’s the lifestyle we chose,” Ray said, “and I wouldn’t have any other life now.”
As we spun our boat around near Napton and prepared to reverse the route back to Lower Heyford, I had a sudden yearning to join the Barnfields — to turn this into a permanent way of life.
- Arab News Features 7 August 2003
