Canals
Have you got any canals near you? What fantastic pieces of engineering they are. I live in a village which is near the Ashby canal, and like all canals, the only real traffice these days are pleasure barges. A hundred years ago, these same canals would be full of freight. Absolutely anything and everything being transported the length and breadth of England. If it were today, no doubt they’d be carrying our stone fireplaces too, as well as all other ‘modern’ items.
I rode my bicycle for 5 miles along the canal this sunday morning, it was very early and the people in the barges were just emerging, sitting on the roofs of their floating holiday home with the first cup of tea of the day. As it was for most of the country, Sunday morning here was very sunny, and being moored up on the edge of a grassy meadow surely took some beating as the place to be.
I don’t know if those commercial barges of 100 years ago worked on Sundays, but even if they did, there must have been many worse jobs than slowly cruising through the english countryside. It’s a bit more ‘romantic’ than the white van that your stone fireplace gets delivered in these days!
I also noticed that nearly all the barges had a little stack of logs on their roofs, and a small chimney, emerging from a little wood stove within. So they’re quite environmentally friendly places to live I suppose, and no doubt on very wooded sections of canal, as it is near where I was, the occupants can collect fuel in the form of fallen branches quite easily.
Perhaps we should look at making a ‘barge-sized’ mini stone fireplace!