Cruising the Rochdale Canal with Shire Cruisers - http://www.shirecruisers.co.uk

I have just returned from a narrow boat holiday on the Rochdale Canal in West Yorkshire, and living as we do in an age where society appears to thrive on complaint and litigation I feel bound to add some counterbalance to this culture by unreservedly praising and recommending Shire Cruisers of Sowerby Bridge. http://www.shirecruisers.co.uk

In terms of customer service, quality of boats, and the comprehensive level of pre-cruise information and training, they surpassed anything we have previously experienced in fifteen previous boating holidays on various parts of the UK inland waterways system. So I am happy to place this on record (and no, they haven’t offered me a free holiday to get me to publish this on the Web!)

To describe the Rochdale Canal I can do no better than to reproduce the introductory piece from the well written Pearsons' “Canal Companion – Pennine Waters” ..

Reaching Sowerby Bridge, the Calder & Hebble Navigation goes into a telephone box, puts its underpants on outside its trousers, and emerges as the Rochdale Canal, Superman of the inland waterways, fully equipped to take on the tyrannical Pennines.

One is treated to the glorious scenery of Calderdale, the steep wooded hillsides, the craggy granite outcrops of the Pennines, and the towns that not only nestle in the valley bottom but climb up the hillsides in a stone-terraced display of gravity denial; then there are the banks of wild rhododendron, yellow iris at the water’s edge, the singing birds in the trees, the ever-watchful herons silently standing in anticipation of a fish supper, and flotillas of ducks and geese.

We were on a short break (less than a week) and were therefore only able to travel westwards from Sowerby Bridge as far as Todmorden before turning round, but the somewhat tame distance of about 12 miles was transformed into a marathon by the existence of 18 manually operated locks raising us by about 200ft on the westward journey, so by the time we had returned to base our aching muscles testified to our completion of 36 lock operations.
We moored up in Hebden Bridge for several hours and were amazed to find that the town was closed! What kind of enterprise society is this, where all the businesses get together and say, “Hey, lets not make any money on Tuesdays!” To be fair, I was told that the shops do open on Saturdays and Sundays, but it still seemed a bit odd to turn up in the middle of the week to find everything battened down. We did, however, manage to get a good lunch at Moyles Restaurant.

We had no time to investigate Todmorden because in our attempts to turn the boat around we got stuck. Water levels were down a bit so turning the boat tended to be more of a mud wrestling exhibition. By the time a number of willing helpers had pushed, pulled and shoved, we finished up in the same direction as before and decided to go through one more lock to find another turning point. This decision introduced us to the first lock with a “guillotine gate” at the lower end, and an ambiguously-written British Waters notice drawing our attention to the fact that although the gate was electrically operated, the paddles (i.e., the valves for draining the lock) were manually operated from a control box “opposite this control panel”. I looked behind me to see what was opposite the control panel and found a smart looking metal box on a post. This turned out to be a repository for dog shit! The paddle controls were on the other side of the gate.

Todmorden was described by Susan of Shire Cruisers as the "Frontier Town" being right on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire. The town is administered by Yorkshire but has an Oldham (Lancashire) Post Code. The poor dears are therefore totally confused.

A short way beyond this lock was our turning point, but again we needed willing land-based helpers (of which there never appeared to be a shortage) conducting a tug-of-war with the sharp end of the boat whilst I did the business at the blunt end with my head all tangled up with overhanging tree branches. After much heaving, reversing, tiller waggling, and a ruined hair style, the boat was now heading back east.

The meteorological office had forecast several days of the most appalling weather so we were tooled up with all the wet weather gear, but as it turned out it was a mixture of sunshine and showers, and not too much of the latter. By comparison with the forecast we felt we had been handed a bonus, making us grateful for the fact that weather forecasting is a somewhat inexact science.