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Letters the state of the waterways
Letters the state of the canals
Is the canal network in an appalling state, thanks to being run by a body that’s “not fit for purpose”? Or is that just the Stratford paddle gear?
In the last issue we published a letter from Mike Day, who was involved in the earliest days of WRG, and who had returned to the Stratford Canal (reopened pre-WRG in 1964, but subject to a lot of maintenance / improvement from WRG and other volunteers in the years when it was run by the National Trust on a limited budget) for a boat holiday recently.
He reported that the canal was generally OK but the paddle gear in particular was in poor condition - “most of the racks were knackered as were the pinions”, surmised that “it looks like the Canal & River Trust are worthy successors to British Waterways Board and reserve all the rubbish gear for this canal” - and asked if any boating readers cared to comment on their experiences of the state of the Stratford - or indeed the waterway system in general.
We have received the following reply...
Hello Martin I was very interested to read Mike Day’s letter in Navvies 308. Like Mike, I am 74 years old and recently retraced a voyage of 30 years ago.
We were showing off to our daughter, son-in-law and grandson the delights of West Yorkshire’s waterways - Calder & Hebble Navigation, Aire & Calder Navigation and the eastern end of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. We had such good memories of cruising these quiet waterways.
What appalled us most was the state of repair of everything. Paddle gear is in a poor state. If a paddle fails, it is not repaired, just covered by a bag saying it needs mending. Only when a further paddle fails and the lock is closed does anything happen.
Gates are in a poor condition. Vegetation is completely neglected. Those wonderful open views are now often obscured by overgrown bushes, but worse far than that it frequently grows right out across the water, obscuring sight-lines of oncoming vessels.
The dredging is non-existent and once I ran aground 3 feet from the bank!
At this time when promoting boating holidays, many potential future customers are surely going to be put off coming again. It is supposed to be a relaxing and enjoyable experience, not a struggle with poor canals. Hire companies must not be happy with the state of our network.
The Canal & River Trust is clearly not fit for purpose, the basic job is not being done.
Regards
Alan Hodson I will admit that (a) my boating postlockdown has been fairly limited and (b) as most of it’s in a full-length narrow boat, I don’t get to navigate many of the Yorkshire waterways (with their shorter locks) as often as I’d like to. So perhaps it’s not unexpected that my experience is different - coming back after a couple of years of little boating and experiencing a few of the (mainly) Midlands routes (but not including the Stratford), I can’t say that I’ve been particularly struck by a general poor state of repair.
Yes, the odd out-of-use paddle, a few more patched-up lock gates than before, the occasional scraping-the-bottom incident, but nothing spectacularly worse than pre-pandemic, nor for that matter from two or three decades back as far as I can remember. (But maybe it’s been creeping up on me slowly.)
However where I do agree with Alan Hodson is regarding the offside vegetation obscuring the sightlines ahead especially on bends - it does appear to have got a whole lot worse in a relatively short time.
To end on a brighter note, on a recent walk on the Macclesfield Canal I came across a local volunteer team hard at work clearing offside vegetation - it’s one area where volunteers can help, and it’s good to see them getting back to work again after the various lockdowns.
Does anyone else have any comments on the state of the system? ...The Editor page 19
