For the last two weeks Jeni and I have been living on a narrowboat on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and working on a smallholding alongside. As I have mentioned before, I seem to be drawn to canals whenever I am working near one, so to be actually living aboard a boat and working on a smallholding seemed an ideal scenario.
However, the reality is not quite as idyllic, although it has been quite an enjoyable stay despite the appalling weather, as our hosts are lovely and have provided us with some wonderful ingredients from which to produce meals, for example: home-cured streaky bacon, home-cured boiling ham, home-produced lamb chops, fresh eggs, homemade bread, homemade sausages and a whole bantam chicken for a pot roast!
The boat itself is a work-in-progress (our hosts live on the boat next door), so has no running water and a chemical loo but it does have electricity. It is a ‘butty boat’, and was originally used for hauling coal along the canals. It is sixty foot long and 6’10” wide – this is exterior dimensions – I would guess that it is only just over six foot wide inside. The family would have lived in a small area at the stern of the boat and that is, basically, where Jeni and I live. We have been sharing a double bed which is the full width of the cabin with a small seating area and a coal stove to the stern end. Scrambling across the bed and through a doorway is the ‘bathroom’ currently housing one Portapotti and a sink with cupboard under (the waste is connected, but all water has to be brought in in 5 gallon containers from the canal side), through another doorway is the ‘galley’ although it only has a small tabletop stove and a couple of floor cupboards with a narrow walkway through the middle. Beyond that is the original hold area, part of which is used as a greenhouse, with clear polythene-sheeted sides and part as a general workshop area, with original tarpaulin sides.
Our hosts breed pure-bred chickens as well as raising a few Tamworth pigs, and we share our living accommodation with two table-top incubators in the galley and, what Jeni and I both thought at first was a fridge, a large three-tier incubator under the work surface. In the greenhouse area there are two brooders (small cages with heat lamps over to keep the chicks warm until their feathers grow) and in the workshop area, another two brooders. Our days (and sometimes our nights, if it is hatching time) are filled with the cheeping of many, many, many chicks! I had a quick, approximate head count the other day and there were 90+ chicks and many more eggs imminently hatching.
The cramped living arrangements have tested the mother-daughter relationship quite severely but miraculously, we are still getting on well and have perfected the ‘narrowboat shuffle’ to enable us to pass each other on the boat without injury! The weather has also not been kind to us, as it has rained on most days and, of course, there is no ‘inside’ work to be done here, so we have just had to grit our teeth, don full waterproof gear and fight the elements while we feed and water hens and once a week apply surgical spirit to their legs with a paintbrush (to prevent/treat a parasite called scaly leg mite) and inspect their rear ends for chicken lice and red mites! As with any mention of lice/mite/flea, you immediately start itching at the very thought, but as you are dolled up in dust mask and surgical gloves (we looked like some chemical warfare clean-up detail with our wet weather gear on as well!) it was nigh on impossible to do anything about it. We have also mulched quite a few pathways and other muddy areas with chipped conifers that a local tree surgeon lets them have, as the ground is clay and gets supremely slippery when it rains. In between all that we have helped prepare some new raised beds in the vegetable garden and turned two compost heaps to improve the rate of breakdown of the compost.
Last weekend we had both days off and set off to ‘do’ the Yorkshire Dales as the canal runs round the edge of them and we are only just in Lancashire here. We are staying at a place called Barnoldswick (pronounced Barlick by the locals!) and I discovered that there is a Rolls Royce factory here where the famous RB211 jet engine was developed and produced (the RB bit refers to Rolls Barnoldswick) It’s amazing the amount of useless(?) information I am accumulating on this journey! First of all we went to Settle for a look round. While we were there it started to rain so we had to take shelter in a tearoom (a pot of tea, a currant slice and a chocolate caramel shortbread) until it eased off! The town is very quaint but seems to be inhabited by a tribe of older folk dressed in natty, outdoor clothing and fell boots, all looking scarily fit and striding about in a purposeful manner (some even had those walking poles)! We stocked up on chocolate crème eggs (for Jeni – she’s addicted) at 25p each (as opposed to the 80p each they tried to charge her at Llanrhaeadr Falls!) and struck off up a steep, minor road into the Dales proper. Jeni (aka The Navigator) may feel that she did not inherit the ‘engineering gene’ from my Dad, but she certainly inherited the one that makes her go up tiny, unmarked roads in out-of-the-way places, ‘just to see where they go’! She did it in Wales the other week and she did it again in the Yorkshire Dales – we literally went ‘up hill and down dale’ and I have no real idea of where we went except that we nearly reached Leyburn in Yorkshire before turning west up the Wensley Dale to Hawes. At Hawes we got out to stretch our legs and bought some speciality cheese from The Little Cheese Shop (Wensleydale with Hendersons Relish and a smoked goats milk gouda) and then wandered along to a cafe/bar called Chaste where we had tea and cake number 2! This time it was white chocolate and raspberry sponge cake! Well, we didn’t have lunch so decided that two teas and cakes was OK. The cafe/bar was very nice with a wood-burning stove and relaxed ‘shabby chic’ sofas for lounging in, It seemed to have a mixed clientele of young people and the same tribe of fit, older people in boots that we’d seen in Settle. If you ever find yourself in Hawes, I would recommend both the cheese shop and the cafe! Eventually, we struck off south and came back to the boat via Settle again. I have no idea how many miles I drove but it must have been well over a hundred.
The next day I decided that I didn’t want to do so much driving so we were going to go to a National Trust property near Keighley called East Riddlesden Hall. Rather than go by main roads, we took the hill roads again and headed for Haworth as I wanted to see where the Bronte family had lived. It was all very ‘Wuthering Heights’ on the way with mile upon mile of moorland all intersected by massive dry stone walls. These walls are not the gentle, neat golden dry stone walls of the Cotswolds, nor even the slightly more rugged ones of Mendip, they are huge, stolid thugs of walls, made of stones so large that I would struggle to lift any of them, and they march everywhere – straight down steep ravines and across scree-strewn crags, cutting the countryside up into manageable portions. Jeni came up with the theory that that is the only way the locals could cope with living in such openness, by walling off bits of it to make it feel more manageable.
As we neared Haworth we started to see yellow roadside signs that said it was Haworth’s 40’s weekend and to expect queues, so we looked on the map and spotted a preserved railway line nearby so decided to go and see what that was like. It was only when we got to the station and saw some photos that the penny dropped – we were at the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway where they filmed the original ‘Railway Children’ film. It was also very weird as a few of the passengers waiting on the platform were obviously going to the 40’s weekend in Haworth (one of the stations on the line) and were in full regalia. Where else could you see an SS officer rubbing shoulders with an RAF officer, two American pilots and a ‘lady of the night’? We were quite intrigued and, being in no particular hurry, brought return tickets to Keighley and waited for the next train to steam in whilst drinking tea (no cakes today!) in the buffet car at the station. The one and a half hour train trip was great fun and we took a few photos of our fellow travellers as they embarked or disembarked at Haworth – it was very strange to see a lady in forties dress complete with fox fur, seamed stockings and a nifty little hat chatting on her mobile phone. We ate our picnic lunch in the car at the station car park as it had started to rain again and eventually drove on to East Riddlesden Hall which turned out to be quite a small and cosy manor house dating back to the 1620’s. I quite like going to National Trust properties but find it a bit intimidating that there is a steward in every room watching your every move and, occasionally, leaping in with unwanted information that you’ve just read on the helpfully-provided laminated sheet in each room. Again, we were there almost at closing time and were eventually shepherded from the premises by a rather surprising guy dressed all in black with a long grey ponytail – I hadn’t realised he was an employee until I saw his identity card – just goes to show you shouldn’t judge by appearance!
I have been amazed at the beauty of the countryside round here, which just goes to prove what an ignorant Southerner I am, as I expected it to be all grey, neglected villages and abandoned ‘dark, satanic mills’ being so near to the industrial towns of The North! Jeni and I took a late afternoon drive into the Forest of Bowland yesterday and it is stunning. By the way we can heartily recommend the tea and cakes at the village shop/tearooms in Bolton-by-Bowland – a tad expensive at £2.30 a slice but delicious and beautifully served on a plate with a dusting of icing sugar and half strawberry! He also opened up especially for us as we got there at 4.30pm and the tearooms were officially closed. What a nice man!
We are here until Monday and then it’s off to a hill farm in Cumbria for two weeks before, finally, crossing the border into Scotland. How did I ever think one year would be enough to do a circuit of Britain, even in two week instalments?
