>Wow, "74 miles and 105 locks." No wonder it took you a week.
>So narrowboats are called such because the original working boats built in
>the 1800's were for carrying goods on the narrow canals? We just call our
>cargo carrying boats 'barges.'
There aren't any (well OK there may be one or two nutters somewhere)
cargo-carrying narrow boats any more. There are a few commercial
waterways with larger boats, but it's mostly all gone long ago.
The narrow boats you see around on the canals are mostly built
specially for the holiday trade, but a few are conversions from
original working boats, and a very few are still maintained in
original condition.
When I was puttering round the canals, there were far fewer boats
around of any sort (1973), and I was privileged to know Joe and Rose
Skinner over a couple of months, and was actually invited into the
cabin of their unpowered (ie, horse-drawn or towed by a boat with a
motor) narrow boat "Friendship". Joe, who had long since retired, was
famous as the "last of the Number Ones", which meant that he was the
last owner-operator of a commercial narrow boat. The boat wasn't in
good condition, the paint was peeling and the wood was rotting, and
once he showed me the painted castles on the side panels, usually
covered up with old tarpaulins.
I knew that both Joe and Rose had passed away quite some time ago, but
it still caught me ooof right in my emotional core when I fiorst saw
this picture of Friendship, all tarted up and gleaming, out of the
water and in a museum...
http://nationalhistoricships.org.uk/images/300/friendship6.jpg
