Welcome

 

A canal holiday offers something for everyone to enjoy. The day to day rhythm of boating, operating the locks and swing bridges, brings a gentle pace to life. Enjoy exploring historic towns and picturesque villages, and take advantage of the many canal side attractions and walking opportunities on offer along the way.

Leave the twenty-first century behind for a while and steer a course back into another Britain, where awe-inspiring feats of engineering have created a unique pathway of peace and tranquillity from which you can view afresh the beautiful countryside of the England and Wales borderlands.

Britain’s 2000 miles of navigable inland rivers and canals hold a very special place in our history. They form an extensive network of cruising routes inherited from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when water was the mainstay of the Industrial Revolution, and heavy horses pulled the boats which carried essential goods all around the country.  Whole families lived on board the boats, and there was a unique community of boat people with their own canal culture.

The rise of the railway and invention of the steam train may have signalled the end of commercial canalling, but we are left with a wonderful inheritance of waterways meandering through town and meadow, moor and forest, through hills and high over deep valleys.  Today we can still trace the footsteps of those who were once at the centre of innovation in transport, and imagine what life was like for families who lived aboard centuries ago.