Waterway Wanderers is BW's fishy business

catching an eel at Lathom Junction on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, July 2008

British Waterways will tomorrow launch a scheme which will encourage more anglers along the banks of our canals. In a press release BW says it's "opening up 300 miles of canal to anglers".

These are excerpts from the press release:

The new Waterway Wanderers scheme launches on Thursday 15 April and will provide access to 122 previously unlicensed locations throughout England and Wales.

John Harding, who will administer the scheme, says: "Waterways Wanderers plugs the gaps between those stretches of waterway which aren’t currently being let to clubs. This scheme will make fishing canals much easier and I’m looking forward to welcoming many more anglers to the waterways."

Mark Lloyd, Chief Executive of the Angling Trust said: “Britain’s canals offer a fantastic resource for anglers of all abilities, in the countryside and inner city alike. Angling Trust adult members will be able to enjoy all that fishing for just £10 a year. We hope that this will encourage thousands of anglers to get out on the towpath and join the Angling Trust.”

(The bold is my emphasis.)

An annual permit will cost £20 (£10 concessions; £5 under 17s), with £10 off for members of the Angling Trust. The Angling Trust website (www.anglingtrust.net) seems to be down at the moment; the closest match appears to be the Angling Foundation.

Now this is all fine if it swells the maintenance coffers of BW, but with annual permits costing a mere £20 at most it will need a lot of anglers to pay for a new lock gate or repair an overflow weir.

That's an awful lot of poles in the water and extending back over the towpath.


fishing match on the River Weaver in July 2008

Two for Sarah and one for the Ducks

The latest (May 2010) issue of Canal Boat magazine has an article by Hugh McKnight about old posters which depicted waterway scenes. With one exception they're all from the first half of the twentieth century, and they're all works of art.

Inconveniently they are not on the magazine's website, and I'm not sure about the legality of photographing and reproducing some examples here, so this will be that very rare post from me: one with no pictures. (Oh, all right, just the one of the magazine cover.)

To the title of this post. The first poster the magazine shows is of narrow boat Sarah in an 1875 scene painted by Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis in 1951. The boat is being towed by an out-of-frame horse on the north Oxford Canal; a steam train passes on the adjacent railway line at Brinklow. The poster is an example of "carriage art", displayed originally in railway coaches.

On the next page is a reproduction of a 1929 poster advertising the charms of Chertsey; and facing it is an UndergrounD one publicising the 1913 Boat Race (book to Shepherd's Bush and thence by Tram to Hammersmith, Putney or Turnham Green). Mr. McKnight writes, "Limited use of colour and a concentration on the essential subject matter to the exclusion of all else has produced an image that feels modern even today."

So that's two posters for Sarah and one for James and Amy.

Leawood Pumphouse

When we walked past the Leawood Pumphouse on the Cromford Canal just before Easter the gate from the towpath was unlocked. I went down the steps to photograph the chimney from underneath, and then walked round to the main doors. These were open, and the engine was being worked on, presumably in readiness for steaming over the Easter bank holiday weekend.


The pumping engine was installed because water to the summit level could not be guaranteed after the Cromford Canal Company was denied access to its original supply, from Sir Richard Arkwright's mill just to the north. It was built in 1850, and pumped water from the River Derwent up to the canal.



(edit to correct name of canal - thanks, BigJohn)

Strange plants

On our walk along the River Lathkill in Derbyshire a few days ago (unnavigable, unless you're a fish) we came across these plants in some boggy land at the river's edge.


I don't recall seeing anything like them before. The stem looks fungus-like, but the flowers don't. Any ideas, anyone?

Update: A.P. has identified this as butterbur, which I had not heard of. From Wikipedia:

The plants commonly referred to as Butterbur

are found in the daisy family Asteraceae in the

genus Petasites. They are mostly quite robust

plants with thick, creeping underground

rhizomes and large Rhubarb-like leaves during

the growing season. Another common name for

many species of this genus is Sweet Coltsfoot.

It goes on to say,

"The short spikes of flowers are produced just before the leaves in spring, emerging with only a few elongated basal bracts and are usually green, flesh coloured or dull white depending on species. Butterburs ... prefer moist environments such as riverbanks, marshes and ditches."

So now I know.

Top Thirty, 2010 week 14

Here is the UK Waterways Site Ranking as it stood at 0930 on Sunday 11th April 2010. This is taken, with permission, from Tony Blews's UK Waterways Ranking Site.


1 Jim Shead's Waterways Information (=)

2 JustCanals.com - Forums (+1)

3 Pennine Waterways (-1)

4 CanalPlanAC (=)

5 Granny Buttons (=)

6 CanalCuttings.co.uk (=)

7 Narrowboat Gypsy Rover (+1)

8 Retirement with No Problem (-1)

9 Towpath Treks (=)

10 Jannock Website (=)

11 UKCanals Network (=)

12 Narrowboat.co.uk (+1)

13 Trafalgar Marine Services (-1)

14 Baddie the Pirate (+12)

15 Waterway Routes (=)

16 nb Epiphany (+1)

17 Google Earth Canal Maps (-3)

18 Water Explorer (-2)

19 WB Takey Tezey (+1)

20 Narrowboat Bones (-1)

21 nb Lucky Duck (=)

22 Chertsey (=)

23 Narrowboat Caxton (+1)

24 Derwent6 (-1)

25 Working Boat Hadar (=)

26 Canal Photos (-8)

27 Zulu Warrior (+1)

28 Contented Souls (+1)

29 Warwickshire Fly Boat Company

30 Seyella's Journey

The figures in parentheses denote the number of places moved since the previous chart; (-) denotes new entry or re-entry into the top thirty; (=) denotes no change.
Halfie is at number 33. There are 101 entries altogether.

Howard shows off his new Volvo

Our former curate (now a fully-fledged vicar), Howard, popped round for coffee the other day. He came in his new car, a 1993 Volvo 940SE, which he'd been given. It was an MOT failure and needed a fair wodge of money spending on it (I think he said £750), but it looks superb.


left to right: Howard, Jan, sometime crew member Adrian, Halfie

The eye is inclined to be deceived

Even though I took this photo, and know the layout, it still looks to me as though the rails are sloping down; and the short tunnel is at the bottom.


Whereas in fact I'm looking UP to the tunnel, which is sloping, and the rails are level!

This is the bottom of Sheep Pasture Incline at the High Peak Junction end of the Cromford and High Peak Railway. Trains of open goods wagons complete with their steam locomotives were hauled up and lowered down the incline, initially by hemp rope and later by steel cable.


Compare the top photo with the one below. This is looking the other way to the tunnel, now more clearly on the incline. (That's the A6 going over the top.)


In the middle is the catch pit, which I talk about here.

Cromford and High Peak Railway

I have already mentioned that we walked along part of the line of the Cromford and High Peak Railway recently.

This was built to link the Cromford Canal at Cromford, Derbyshire, with the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge, which at the time was in Cheshire. The original plan, in the 1820s, was to build a canal, but the railway worked out at about a fifth of the cost.


The railway was built along very similar lines to a contour canal, and included the tightest curves of any railway in the country. Where flights of locks would have been, the trains were hauled up and lowered down inclined planes. The above photo is of the engine house at the top of Sheep Pasture incline.

The incline is at about 1 in 8, one of the steepest and longest on the railway. This is it, but it's difficult to see how steep the slope is when there are no references.


I was surprised to see an old crane about half way down; would they really have stopped on the incline for loading etc.?


At the bottom is a catch pit to trap runaway wagons. A pointsman would have judged the speed of descending wagons, and, if all was in order, he would pull over points to let the train bypass the catch pit. It seems that the default setting was straight into the pit!


And here's one which crashed earlier.


The railway was built to standard 4' 8½" gauge and had the highest summit level in the country. When it opened, in another parallel with canals, wagons were pulled by horses along the level sections; the 33 mile journey taking two days. One day I'd like to cycle along the entire route. I'd like to think I'd be able to do it in considerably less time!

I have taken much of the information for this post from Peter Whitehead's excellent article on the Inland Waterways Protection Society pages of David Kitching's website.

Peter Whitehead has also written in great detail about the Peak Forest Tramway, which ran to Bugsworth Basin, just round the corner from Whaley Bridge on the Peak Forest Canal. He gives very useful information about how early tramways were constructed, and explains why remnants you might stumble across today look as they do.