My canal boat journey to find the last slivers of untouched England

A trip in the wake of narrowboating pioneer Lt Col Rolt uncovers the nation’s time-warped pockets

Over the coming weeks and months, Paul Miles will be following in the wake of narrowboating pioneer Lt Col Rolt, retracing a journey he made – and wrote about – more than 80 years ago and reflecting on how England has changed, and why so many people still find pleasure on the country’s canals. This is the first part of his journey. 
In August 1939, newlyweds in their 20s set off from Banbury on a honeymoon with a difference: travelling the inland waterways of England in their “design for living”, a former cargo boat that they had converted into a cosy home. That they had installed a bath caused much amusement among the working boat people who hauled cargo by horsepower; whole families living in tiny, cramped back-cabins.
The adventurous couple was engineer Tom Rolt and his first wife, Angela. Their extended honeymoon trip of 1939 and 1940, before the Second World War curtailed plans, became the subject of Tom (Lt Col) Rolt’s book, Narrow Boat, published in 1944. It was a bestseller and the catalyst for the formation of the Inland Waterways Association, the rescuing of Britain’s canals from dereliction and their repurposing for leisure. 
Eighty-five years later, I’ve just cruised out of Banbury on my narrowboat home on the start of a journey tracing Tom and Angela’s 400-mile voyage, their exact route still possible today. Tooley’s Boatyard, where Tom and Angela’s Shropshire fly-boat, Cressy, had its makeover, is still there, having fought off plans for demolition when Castle Quay shopping centre was built in the 1970s. “Workers found the remains of a boat during construction,” says Matt Armitage, the owner of Tooley’s and a keen historian and former archaeologist. The working boatyard now houses a small museum and is still the site of a blacksmith’s.
The coat of arms of the market town of Banbury features the sun in splendour. Appropriately, it was shining brightly the day I undid my mooring ropes, passing the Light, a new entertainment complex adjacent to the canal, with 10-pin bowling, arcade games and a multi-screen cinema. All this concrete, steel and glass was fields when the Rolts “slipped Cressy’s mooring lines and drew slowly away from the boatyard… with Mr Tooley senior in his Sunday suit and best bowler” helping Tom and Angela through the locks on their first day’s four-mile cruise to the village of Cropredy.
Much of the cruise northwards out of Banbury would still be recognisable by Rolt. The surrounds are still “deserted water meadows beside the Cherwell, [the] only spectators the cattle on the bank”, but before these scenes are reached, you see grey boxy warehouses surrounded by razor wire and the M40 crossing the canal. Although the soundscape is traffic noise, the canal’s banks are a serene scene: an abundance of wildflowers; of bulrushes, meadowsweet and willowherb. 
At a former lock-keeper’s cottage that seems abandoned – its windows shuttered – a man appeared. As he helped me through the lock, he explained how he bought this 18th-century cottage recently at auction after his narrowboat sank. Like living on a boat, his new home has no mains power, no mains water supply or sewerage, and no road access. In Rolt’s day, the house would have been home to a lock-keeper in the employment of the Oxford Canal Company, who, as well as helping boats through, would have been a lengthsman, responsible for maintaining the canal and towpath so horses could haul vessels without hindrance. The towpath would not have been a public right of way as it is today.
On the outskirts of Cropredy, I moored opposite Peewit Farm and a meadow where curlews nested. That evening, as the horizon bled from tangerine to navy, bats flitted hungrily above the water. I cooked dinner and read more of Narrow Boat and Rolt’s autobiography. Tom and Angela often bought supplies – especially fresh milk – direct from farms beside the canal. My provisions were from supermarkets in Banbury. Cressy was lit with paraffin lamps but my boat has 12V LED bulbs and fairy-lights. Cressy had a contraption for pumping water from the canal when it was clean enough to do so. My boat has a 200-gallon water tank that I fill from mains taps at water points. Cressy had originally been horse-drawn, was then converted to steam, then diesel and, during the war, paraffin.
Cropredy lock must be one of the prettiest in the country and, apart from some lock-side poetry on steel tablets that look like tombstones, can barely have changed since the 78-mile canal was completed in 1790. On one side of an arched bridge, there is an ironstone ashlar cottage that long predates the canal, its flowery garden forming the banks of the waterway. On the other side, the former lock-keeper’s cottage provides another riot of flowers. 
I moored above Elkington’s lock in a tunnel of greenery. Two oaks sheltered the boat from the hot sun. They must have been about 100 years old – and if so, they were mere saplings 85 years ago. In the field opposite, sheep grazed. Apart from the occasional plane overhead, it was all so quiet that I could hear the grinding molars and clicky jaws of my ovine neighbours. Reflections of sunlight on water dappled the ceiling of the boat, a joy that Rolt wrote about. The intertwined limbs of the oaks also shimmered in silvery reflected light.  
Mist was rising from the surface of the canal as sunlight filtered through the trees when I awoke just before six. I set off an hour later, passing a row of moored boats at the bottom of Claydon locks, one painted with scenes of flowers and fungi and the name “Purple Ayzz”. In the 85 years since the Rolts’ pioneering adventure, the number of live-aboard narrowboats on the canals has mushroomed. Boats old and new are homes to thousands of people. Residential canal-side moorings with gardens, shepherd’s huts, chicken coops and wind turbines would amaze Rolt, and I think he would be a little jealous. 
At the second lock, I was pleased to see a man wearing a royal blue shirt. Derrick has been volunteering with the Canal & River Trust for seven years. “I come every day. Last year I only had eight days off. I like being outdoors, and it keeps you fit,” he says. Although it was only 7.30am, he had already been at the locks for two hours, “sorting out water levels – they always drop overnight”. Derrick remembers 30 years ago when there was a resident lock-keeper. “He planted potatoes here,” he says, pointing to a vegetable patch beside one of the five locks, where there was a little brick shed with a chimney in which the lock-keeper would store tools and keep warm. Today a volunteer lock-keeper plants fruit and vegetables for passing boaters. I helped myself to rhubarb. The former lock-keeper’s cottage at the top of the flight is now a holiday let that costs up to £1,000 a night, says Derrick. 
The long stretch of the Oxford Canal between Claydon and Napton-on-the-Hill is famously wiggly. It takes 11 miles to go five. Rolt describes how “for mile after mile we wound about… following the irregular contour of the land, the way so tortuous that we lost all sense of direction” This was early canal engineer James Brindley’s method of routing canals “before the age of hurry”, following the land’s contours. 
Rolt mentions the wife of a working boater who tells him that in the spring “you can smell the violets in the banks, something lovely as you goes along”. Now the pastoral bliss of this lonely stretch of canal, uninterrupted by road or village, is scarred by earthworks. Mechanical diggers and dumper trucks heap up embankments. Farmland is being transformed into the route of HS2. A new bridge over the canal will carry trains at 225mph. The “age of hurry” has finally reached this otherwise tranquil spot.
After two nights moored in quiet seclusion in the twists and turns that remain undisturbed by HS2, I descended the locks to Napton-on-the-Hill, where the hilltop windmill is now restored rather than derelict. The canal-side pub, the Bull and Butcher of Rolt’s day, is now the Folly Inn. Tom and Angela spent an evening there with the husband-and-wife teams of working cargo boats who had moored alongside them, stabling horses nearby. While the landlord poured beer from a tall enamelled jug, boat captains in dark corduroys and gold earrings played darts by lamplight. Today the landlord wears tweed and has a waxed moustache. 
Beer is not served from enamelled jugs but all things copper and brass – kettles, lamps, bowls, horseshoes – hang from every beam and lintel. “A couple who live on a boat come every year and spend two days polishing it all for me,” says landlord Mark. “They do it for the love of it and to give them somewhere to aim for on their travels.” Next door, a new venue, the Potting Shed, was decorated with flowerpots and fairy-lights. A live band played soulful jazz while holidaying boaters sipped wine and nibbled cheese. 
Then it was another meandering rural stretch of canal, this time broad enough for wide-beam boats. I stopped at a quiet mooring spot overlooking hills and fields of ripe wheat, seeking shade – for the boat and me – under an ash tree.
The village of Braunston, at the junction of the Oxford and Grand Union canals, has long been an important hub for boaters. The Victorian gothic church is known as the cathedral of the canals and is where many working boat families married, christened their infants and were buried. In 1923, Braunston was the scene of an extended strike by working boat men and their families, protesting about pay. They blockaded the canals by chaining their boats together. It all ended bloodily. 
Braunston’s six locks, ascending to a tunnel over a mile long, are my first wide locks on this journey, able to take two narrowboats side by side. Another narrowboat joined me on the ascent. Onward was built in 1903 and converted from horsepower to diesel in 1938, says one of its owners, Lynn. She stood at the tiller while her husband, Willi, operated the locks, opening and closing gates and winding paddles to allow gallons of water to lift us upwards. The water comes from a reservoir in Daventry Country Park, a pleasant place to walk, birdwatch and, on Sunday mornings, join an organised swim in the reservoir. I had cycled there the day before, via a new bike path. 
During our six-lock ascent, which took more than an hour, Lynn wore a hat decorated with feathers, flowers and braids. She wears it all the time, she says. “And no doubt it’ll be on my coffin one day.” She tells me how she and Willi bought Onward as a project boat to do up when Willi was diagnosed with cancer. “He wanted something to do rather than mope around,” says Lynn. “When he had the energy, he worked on the boat. She was a complete wreck when we bought her.” Onward originally carried cargo of coal and cotton on the Cromford Canal in Derbyshire, an isolated waterway that is still undergoing restoration by volunteers.
The sociability of canal travel is one of its many joys. There is always time to chat, even when on the move. Rolt would be thrilled to know that boats that had plied the waterways from before he was born are still cruising. Instead of cargo, they carry folk seeking a slower pace, healing their lives. And while some canals may have fallen out of use, there are still more than 2,000 miles of interconnected waterways on which an increasing number of us live on boats full-time, nomads of “the cut”.
I have been one for more than 15 years now. In my 55ft narrowboat home, my slow voyage continues. I look forward to welcoming you on this new journey, recreating Tom and Angela’s travels.