You have to be careful with canal
pubs. You would think that a canal is a canal is a
canal, and any location by a canal makes the pub worth
a visit. Not so. Unless the pub is next to a lock,
or preferably a flight of locks, where you can watch
boats navigate through these feats of engineering,
it may as well be right next to a small puddle, and
a muddy one to boot.
There are no fewer
than seven pubs in Long Itchington, one of which (The
Buck & Bell, now sadly closed, overgrown and sad)
is on the National Register of Historic Pubs, so a
return trip is certainly on the cards. I strongly
suspect that we did not pick the best of the bunch
on this visit, and more than likely, we did not pick
the worst either.
They say there is something relaxing
about watching large narrowboats negotiate locks.
They say it has something to do with the timeless
rhythm, the methodical, logical step-by-step process.
Personally, there is something immensely relaxing
about drinking good beer at a good pub while watching
vacationing families fall apart as parents hog the
easy job of steering while yelling mercilessly at
crying children who are seriously overmatched by sluice
gate valves built for burly bargemen.
On about the third pint and the seventeenth
narrowboat, you begin to hope for that poor unfortunate
wretch who gets the stern caught under the lip of
the gate as the lock inexorably fills with water.
Lower and lower the stern goes, wider and wider the
throttle is opened.
In my youth I canoed long stretches
of English canal system in a hand-made two-man kayak,
including one separate silly day when we covered fifty
miles. I thought 180 miles on one trip was more than
sufficient for one canoeing career, but my friend,
undaunted, undertook and completed a 500-mile trip
without me using the same two-man canoe. It is an
immensely enjoyable form of transport and the canal
system is in good enough shape to make it all perfectly
possible. Much like this book encourages you to see
England through its back door, so navigating the canals
of England allows you to see a side rarely seen, an
industrial and rural culture that has been overlaid
but not destroyed by modern developments.
A great example
of this stays with me to this day. My friend and I
were canoeing in the center of Birmingham, England’s
second-largest and third-ugliest city. Our route took
us right under a major freeway intersection, graphically
nicknamed 'Spaghetti Junction'. In order to find the
space to build such a monstrosity, they had to find
a spot in a crowded city where they could stand a
lot of big concrete posts, and radiate roads out from
them. Logically, they chose the Spagetti Junction
of the canal world, where a number of old canals came
together. So there we were admiring this gorgeous
little footbridge over the canal, a footbridge cast
in a single piece of iron, painted an imposing black
with detail picked out in white – while above
us huge spans of concrete supported by massive struts
towered above us, carrying a thundering roar of modern
traffic. The juxtaposition of ages was remarkable.
There was plenty of backdoor Britain
to see in Birmingham, as occasionally unsightly as
it may be. There are more miles of canal to explore
in Birmingham than there are in Venice!
In defense of the Two Boats, there
is a lock within walking distance, and there is a
bridge, appropriately numbered right next door, but
it still strikes me that there is a flat, still piece
of water sitting out front. The lock is Long Itchington
Bottom Lock, a single lock that lulls canal-goers
into a false sense of complacency before hitting Hatton
with its relentlessly long, stamina-sapping flight
of locks.
There are several
different ways of getting a seventy-foot barge up
a hill, other than your standard single lock. When
engineering skills and knowledge developed sufficiently
to allow extensive use of cuttings, embankments and
aqueducts, canal-builders would 'save-up' an incline
and do it all at once, such as at Hatton and again
at Audlem, where there are fifteen consecutive locks.
Even more spectacular are the elaborate
inclined planes and assorted lifts. Many alternatives
to locks were tried out by the canal engineers, eager
to reduce the loss of water during lock operation,
(about 50,000 gallons for a narrow lock) and to save
the costs of lock construction.
Inclined planes usually had rails
on which tanks containing a boat could be pulled up
from one canal level to another. There was one at
Foxton on the Grand Union Canal, the same canal on
which the Two Boats Inn sits.
Lifts, like the one at Anderton on
the Trent and Mersey Canal on the right, lifted boats
vertically, usually in water filled tanks. Anderton
has two tanks that can each take two narrowboats and
lift fifty feet from the River Weaver to the canal.
Originally the two tanks counterbalanced each other
but weight and pulleys were added to enable the tanks
to operate independently.
Anyway, oh yes, the pub. A bit disappointing
really, not that we were expecting very much. We had
not even really planned to go here, but we saw it
by the road as we were off somewhere else, so we turned
around and wandered in. A small bar, but with lots
of seating outside. The pub and the cider were both
moderate, and there was not even a heap of canal traffic
to keep us entertained.
