Ninety one locks in thirty three miles

In Tuel Lane lock, deepest in Britain

Well, we are finally here. At the start of what you could call the canal boater's Everest, the Rochdale Canal, the toughest of the three trans-Pennine canals; no summit tunnels, just endless locks up one side and down down the other.
The canal lay derelict from the early 1970s and only after a huge restoration effort was it brought back to life for boat traffic in 2002.
Base camp, as it were, for us was at Sowerby Bridge where the Rochdale branches away from the terminus of the Calder & Hebble. And what a magnificent terminus it is, too, surrounded by massive old stone warehouses that once dealt with the trans-shipment of goods between the two canals, all regenerated now into bars, restaurants and offices but still alive with boats and the base of the Pennine hire specialists, Shire Cruisers.

Leaving Lock One to begin the assault on the Rochdale

After travelling the length of the A&C alone, we met up with Nb Naomi May at Salterhebble for the last two locks on the A&C. In the morning sun the basin was even more charming and kept trimmed and litter free by volunteers, one of whom helped us through the lock.

Last lock on the Calder & Hebble and the first time we've had a travelling companion

One of the unsung volunteer heroes who keep Salterhebble so smart

At Sowerby we fuelled up in the basin while our travelling companions went onto the Rochdale – but not very far. When we arrived they were still puzzling over the padlocked gates of the first lock. Lock Three, Tuel Lane, on the canal is the deepest in Britain – 19ft 8.5 ins (three more than Bath deep lock) - and it's also approached through a short, curved tunnel under a main road. When the canal was restored this arrangement replaced two locks.

The magificent and bustling canal basin at Sowerby Bridge

There's a lock-keeper to operate things. He's not full-time so you have to book which we did, for 2pm. Then you wait for him to arrive and unlock the gates into Lock One and Two just below it. By 2.30 we were making phone calls and by 3.00 we were thinking of giving up. Finally at 3.30 a lockie turned up. "Sorry, I think someone possibly forgot". Never mind, it was a lovely sunny afternoon, time for teas, beers and a chat.
Tuel Lane lock is, indeed, deep – and even deeper if, like Mrs B you are way down in its depths – but with two boats in it and the lockie filling it steadily, the pair of us rose steadily up toward the surface.
Our companions pottered away out of Soweerby but we tied up on the first available rings after the lock.
Let the assault begin tomorrow; tonight it's to the pub! We headed off to the highly rated Navigation, a tucked away pub just back beyond the canal basin where we enjoyed one of the best pub meals we've had in a long time – and at a 'tenner for main and dessert' a delicious bargain too.

Almost there

The view from tonight's mooring at Saterhebble

Another day of glorious late summer sunshine has brought us virtually to the end of the Calder & Hebble. Tonight we are moored in the middle of the picturesque Salterhebble locks and within a couple of miles of the start of the Rochdale Canal.

The River Calder – in the warm sunshine it could be the Dordogne

The C&H has continued to charm us though its character has started to change as it moves toward the Pennine hill country and begins to show a more gritty side to it. Old mills and mill chimneys dot a route which is still largely countrified and ran for most of today in close parallel with the River Calder as it travelled sparkling  over rocks and low weirs through a thickly wooded valley. In the warm sunshine we could almost have been in the Dordogne!

Coming through the locks at Brighouse

First stop today was Brighouse where the C&H parts company with the river for the last time and rises through a pair of locks separated by an attractive circular pound. Brighouse has a not unattractive waterfront with a couple of well converted old mill buildings though there are a few more lying empty and derelict that remind one of its now-gone industries.
Then back out into the country we went, with locks now much more closely spaced but just as haphazard in their condition and working methods. Forget your handspike for just one locks and you'll be sure it's the only one where you'll need it. A couple of miles after Brighouse the canal runs through a long, straight thickly wooded stretch with a nature reserve to one side and some handy mooring rings. A good spot for lunch and a walk through the reserve – which it turns out was created by landscaping and replanting a huge rubbish dump. On the other side of the river another handfill site is in the process of getting the same treatment with bulldozers and trucks moving and spreading tons of top soil into position.

One of the many old derelict waterside mills

The little town of Elland has, according to the guidebook, "an attractive canal basin" and is "a good stopping place". Well maybe, so long as you don't mind the roar of traffic over the new bypass and bridge. We pressed on to Salterhebble and its flight of three locks – the first of which has a guillotine bottom gate (full of surprises is the C&H), an alteration made to squeeze the gate in beside a road.
We are now in a large pound and small mooring basin with just a couple of locks between us and the end of the Calder & Hebble.

Cruising in the country and enjoying the sunshine

Into the unknown

Rural charms of the Calder & Hebble

Today, to adapt a famous statement by Donald Rumsfeld about Iraq and 'WMDs', we have been dealing in known unknowns but tonight we are into an unknown unknown.
I will translate into English! We have spent the day working our way along the Calder & Hebble. We've been here before, five years ago but in the opposite direction when we came from Huddersfield. So we should know it but we don't! It all seems so incomprehensibly unfamiliar: it's a known unknown – I think. Maybe it's because we were heading east not west; maybe because we were with another boat. Who knows.
But it made today feel more special; it all felt new and I don't think we will forget it again. The C&H might have its roots in commerce and industry but now it is a delightfully countrified route, threading between canal and river stretches via a steady string of locks and flood locks. Though civilisation by way of towns and industry lurks close at times it only touches the canal occasionally – and one of those times is by our favourite supermarket, Lidl!

A double dose of the heavyweight locks at Dewsbury

The locks are as rustic as the canal; operating mechanisms vary haphazardly from handspike to windlass and most of the locks leak like the proverbial sieves – Battyeford so badly that I had to keep all the top paddles open to keep the lock topped up so we could open a top gate. For good measure, the upstream lock landing had also collapsed into the water!
Finally, after Cooper Bridge Lock – where a ferocious doberman on a worryingly thin chain outside the nearby lock cottage kept up a scary level of barking throughout – we went on through the next flood lock and beyond the point at which we had previously joined the C&H from the Huddersfield canals.

A typical C&H lock – with that vegetation it will soon become a SSSI

Evidence of its commercial past being slowly reclaimed by nature

Now we were into the land of unknown unknowns where the helpful Nicholsons Guide had marked a couple of mooring sites just after the first lock. Except they weren't there. So we are spending the night perched on the end of the lock landing. And tomorrow, into the unknown again.

But the past is remembered in canalside sculptures at Mirfield

Not just a ropey lock but a collapsed landing stage at Battyeford

Another day, another waterway

A floating apartment block passes us

After a couple of days of hanging around in Castleford, we've moved on. Not before time, really, Apart from a handy Aldi and a friendly local boatyard, Supreme Marine, the place hasn't a lot to offer beyond a decent array of boat moorings. But when it's peeing with rain outside, tucked up on a mooring in Castleford is as good a place to be as anywhere.
Today dawned misty but dry and within an hour the sun had burnt the mist away and started to turn the temperature gauge up. We were ready for the off ... but then Seadog Brian decided to fall in again in an over-excited leap from boat to bank. With him hauled out and towelled off, we headed through the enormous Castleford flood lock – as big as a swimming pool – and on to the Calder part of the Aire & Calder; the Aire disappearing up to Leeds. The locks are still huge but all we have to do is push a few buttons and hydraulics take care of the rest.

Pimp my lifeboat!

The big locks date back to the commercial barge days but the only water-giant we saw was one that had been converted to a live-aboard. What a monster: not so much a floating apartment, more a block of flats. There's an entertaining assortment of boats on this waterway; lots of barges of every size and condition, widebeams, narrowboats, fancy plastic cruisers and even a lifeboat which had been given a serious pimping up job.
At Wakefield we got a rude awakening: the easy-peasy electric locks came to a sudden stop at the manual Fall Ing lock – one of the heaviest and fiercest we've encountered anywhere. Wakefield looks a busier town that Castleford but the sight of a sunken boat at Fall Ing and a drunken woman sleeping it off under a bridge on the towpath doesn't encourage mooring. We pressed on and at Thornes Lock just outside of town found ourselves officially on the Calder & Hebble.

As far as the eye can see is lock – a giant flood lock on the Aire&Calder

Like the Aire&Calder, it's part river, part canal but it starts with a section of canal and a lock that sets the tone – heavy and decrepit. Not that I mind; the electric push button stuff gets a bit tediously easy. Thornes is also a chance to try out my 'Calder&Hebble handspike' (or scrap length of 3x2 timber). The gate paddles on this and some other C&H locks are levered up using this rather than the familiar windlass. It's a crude but simple technique.

My Calder&Hebble handspike gets its first work-out

A short length of canal and we were out through Thornes flood lock into the Calder river. These flood locks are usually left open in decent weather – just as well since there are plenty of them and some are huge. A mile of river and another rickety slow filling lock saw us call time, ready to watch the sun set and a full moon gradually take its place.

A short history lesson

Ferrybridge cooling towers rise out of the morning mist

We have only travelled half a dozen miles today from last night's mooring near Bank Dole lock up the Aire & Calder to our stop at Castleford. But those miles have given us a short sharp lesson in industrial history.
Soon after starting off the huge cooling towers of the Ferrybridge power station loomed hazily ahead in the morning mist and once we were through the massive flood lock we were soon passing the sprawling site – a site which until not too long ago was supplied with a million tons of coal a year by barge from north east England's mines, as the long lines of mooring bollards stand rusting testament to.
Of course the mines have now gone and in less than ten years the coal fired power station will go too as it fails pollution standards. It's the third generation station on the site and has passed through numerous hands since being privatised in 1989. New biomass and wood multi-fuel power stations are in the pipeline to replace the coal station.
The Aire & Calder is part canal, part river and all of it a grandly proportioned commercial waterway. Evidence of its working past is all around, from huge bollards to derelict coal chutes to part overgrown steps and jetties.

The sprawling Ferrybridge power station

The rural charms of the river hide old coal workings

Beyond Ferrybridge flood lock we are back in the river, wide, richly tree lined and slow flowing. It is astonishingly rural and quite delightful once we are past the power station. The rural bliss is deceptive: beyond the trees are derelict coal workings, spoil tips and subsided ground now become lakes. These days it is all a wildlife sanctuary and only a glimpse of a couple of disused coal loading wharves through the trees reminds us of its past.

The pedestrian bridge and Castleford's famous flour mill

At Bulholme Lock – where, surprisingly, a keeper was on duty to operate things – the Castleford cut leaves the river as it winds through the centre of the town and provides moorings and facilities for the likes of us. Dereliction is all about us still – we cruise past a huge wasteland of demolished factory works with a now abandoned river bridge that joined it to something of equal scale on the other bank. Whatever will replace it? The ubiquitous warehousing and out of town Ben & Jerry/Kentucky Fried/Homebase maybe?

At the edge of the huge weir is this fish ladder - even salmon are here now

Moored up, we walked down into Castleford and over the pedestrian river bridge, newly built when we were last here as part of a regeneration project. To judge by the rest of the town, that seems to have stalled. This is not a well-off place. Cheap food stores, pound stretching, cash converting shops fill the high street and the shoppers look grim-faced with the struggle to keep going. Sad.

Moving on and looking back

Our excursion to the north eastern limits of the waterway network is now officially over. We have come back down the Selby Canal and River Aire and returned to the Aire & Calder that we left some three weeks ago.
In most respects I'm glad to be moving on to new territory. These out and back trips pose an organisational conundrum. Should one do all the sightseeing on the way out and then rush back or somehow share it between trips – and if so how?
This is particularly so on a river-based cruise where mooring opportunities are limited - pretty much Selby, Naburn, York, Boroughbridge, Ripon and that's it. Of them all only York truly deserved some extra days on the return leg.
So I'm glad to be back on the narrowboater's familiar never-ending, ever-onwards journey. But what I will miss of those few weeks on the Ouse is the camaraderie that gradually built up between us little band of boaters who were doing the trip at the same time. Bound together by mooring spots and time limits we found ourselves repeatedly meeting, separating and re-meeting as we travelled up and then back down the river. From being strangers, we became acquaintances and - in some cases - friends.
There was the woman who was single-handing her way around the system and already with some of its toughest challenges under her belt. The couple on their little seagoing boat with their blood curdling tales of offshore trips. A cheery American who we thought was single handed but it turned out actually had a wife though we had never seen her, she exited the boat so rarely. A narrowboating couple who we feared we had offended by overtaking on the river but who, when we finally dared speak to them, were friendly, jolly and not at all offended. And a likeable Geordie returning his boat to its mooring in Ripon who we said goodbye to there – only to find him standing at the lock entrance in Selby watching our return because he happened to be in the town.
Doubtless we will see one or two of them again in the weeks or maybe years to come but with a spider's web of routes and a myriad moorings to choose from on the waterways it could be a while.

Heading back via divers, sandstorms and dead cows

We are now back snug in our security blanket of the canal system, moored up in Selby Basin. In five easy paced days we have come from Ripon with stopovers in Boroughbridge, York and Naburn before tackling the tidal Ouse today to reach Ripon.
It's been very much a repeat showing of the outbound trip – there isn't much opportunity for moring variation on the Ouse. Boroughbridge was an overnighter that confirmed what an affable little place it is. Then we motored down to York, via Linton Lock where divers had been at work inspecting the decaying lock chamber. "Is it alright to come through?" I asked and having been told it was we drove in, only to be told off for coming in! Hmm not sure I'd want to be a diver with that sort of safety control operating.
York's Museum Gardens were as busy as ever with boats out enjoying the last weekend of the school hols. We nipped in on the coffee boat's reserved spot as they had left for the day and nipped off sharpish the next morning when we saw them arriving into a (fortunately for us) freshly vacated slot.
York was still the same feverishly crowded city but not so nice for us this time with gusting winds whipping up clouds of fine sand off the riverside pavements. It found its way everywhere - on the cooker, in the sink, all over the computer, the engine: we are still clearing it up now.
Last time we were in York mid-week but this time it was the start of the weekend. Boy what a difference! On Saturday, intermingling with the families and tourists were knots of lads on stag parties and girls on hen nights. The hens, I have to say, were the more entertaining: bright, short, one-size-too-small dresses and heels like shiny six inch nails. The lads were dowdy by comparison.
But by the late afternoon the weak livered and the over-enthusiastic were already feeling the pace, veering and wobbling. The girls were still the stars; enthusiastically dancing to the various buskers, much to the entertainment of the foreign tourists who possibly thought they were just part of the act.
By the early evening the bars and clubs were raucous and nervous pensioners like us had scattered from the streets like frightened locals when the western shoot-out is about to begin. But I do wonder how many of the stilettos made it through the evening?
We had allowed a couple in a small Colvic sea-boat that we'd met back at Naburn on the way to moor alongside as the moorings were now full. He advised a chain to deter midnight drunks from any attempts at unmooring us 'just for a laugh'. I thought him a bit over-cautious but having returned from the front line I changed my mind.
John is a laid-back sort of character and was entertaing us – if that's the right word – with tales of their trip to Whitby and back in the Colvic when the waves were crashing right over the front as the little boat pitched through heavy seas. He was unworried by it all, or at least gave a good impression of being. I think it was then that I decided to stop worrying about tidal locks. No waves, no force 6 winds, just a simple turn in a river.
Today I put my no-worries mindset into practice. Even Seadog Brian falling overboard just before the off didn't phase me (he was trying to jump to the bank while wrestling with his lead and succeeded in tangling himself up and sploshing into the water).
Brian showered clean and dried off, we left Naburn Lock to the usual timetable; pushing the incoming tide, which isn't very fierce here at its upriver extremities, for five miles to the Cawood Swingbridge from which point we felt the increasing thrust of the now-ebbing tide and the glorious sensation of gliding down the river at speed, needing just touches of the a superlight tiller to ease one smoothly through the turns.
About five miles from the end we saw a dead calf in the water, which was a sad sight, but worse was to come as we neared Selby – the body of a large adult cow was drifting in the tidestream and had been going up and down with the tides for some days apparently.
A safety boat flagged us down here to warn us of work on the railway swingbridge which was undergoing test swings after its £12m renovation. He radioed ahead and confirmed we were ok to press on.
So, round the last tight left-hander, under the road and rail bridges and the lock should have come into sight. But it didn't. I saw the adjoining block of flats but where was the lock mouth? My plan was to turn before the lock and hope that, knowing our propensity to be hurled broadside downstream, we would get round and in without too much fighting back against the flow.
I finally saw the lock, heaved the tiller over, gave it Warp Factor Five and round we started to come. Three-quarters turned, I saw we were facing the lock mouth so I thought 'why not?', gave it Warp Nine and powered at the lock. We went straight in, throttled back and while Mrs B pulled us in to the front securing stay with the hook I looped the stern line round the guide at the rear. Job done.
It was a ten out of ten entry. I must admit I was pretty chuffed. Just don't ask me to do it again!

PS Sorry about the lack of pictures of girls in stilettos or wet dogs.