Canal Boat Diaries

One thing that becomes completely obvious when you travel a lot or even a little is that all travel days are not created equal. Some days you just look forward to way more than others. Sometimes those days pan out really well and sometimes (and regrettably) they disappoint. This post is about one of those most anticipated days. And it did not disappoint.

The photograph above is a ground-level view of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct crossing the River Dee in the town of Trevor in Wales. It is the longest aqueduct in Great Britain and the tallest canal aqueduct in the world. It was designed in the late 18th century by Thomas Telford and was completed and opened in 1805. It is still in use today. Telford, one of several world famous civil engineers active in the 1800s along with fellow Britons Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, knew what he was doing.

The aqueduct was designed to be navigable by narrowboats, a type of barge particular to the island of Great Britain which are generally less than 7 feet wide and less than 75 feet long, although in some cases they are significantly shorter than the 75 feet maximum. The use of narrowboats and canals in Britain began in earnest at around the time of the Industrial Revolution to transport goods to and from mills and factories and mines. That network of canals constructed in Britain to move all those goods around, into and out of the country is still there today and is still very, very active, even if its original purpose is (mostly) long gone.

Over the time that I've been writing this blog, we've visited other significant works of civil engineering in Britain, including the Tower Bridge and the Thames Barrier in London and the Firth of Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland. The Pontsysyllte Aqueduct is located less than an hour and 15 minutes from our hotel in Llandudno where we were spending our first three nights in Wales. We could not pass up the opportunity to visit this icon of British engineering.

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in the Welsh landscape. 

You don't need to do much in the way of anything special outside of having a car to get to the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. You can drive right up to this marvel of stone and cast iron. You can even walk across it on the walkway that is adjacent the waterway which makes up the oh-so-impressive full 12 feet width of this structure. It's a piece of cake to get a super detailed, up close experience here.

We didn't do that. 

Yes, we wanted to see the Aqueduct from both below and above but we didn't want to just drive up to it and walk across. We wanted to cross the full span in a narrow boat high above the Dee River. I mean, after all, this is what the Aqueduct was really and originally built to support. Let's be legit about this experience and go over it in a boat. And there are companies in the area around the town of Trevor which offer round trip boat rides over the Aqueduct and it only takes a couple of hours.

We didn't do that either. 

What's better than booking a spot on a narrow boat to cross the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct? How about having a 32 foot long boat all for your party and nobody else? Private boat for the day so we could take the trip at our own leisure and schedule with nobody else to worry about? Sounded ideal. THAT is what we wanted to do as soon as we found out about it. Boat for the day? Rented!

Then we went one better over that situation. These boats hold a maximum of ten people. We had the whole boat. Why not bring some other folks along. So we got my cousin and her husband to come down from Manchester and my uncle and aunt to come over from Yorkshire and we made a day of it. It is rare that I get to spend time actually doing something with my relatives from over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean so this day was poised to be amazing. Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in a boat? That was our original plan. Doing it as a private excursion with family? How does it get any better?

By the way, I have no idea how to pronounce Pontcysyllte. No clue. Forgot to ask.

Our chariot for the day, the Dydd Un, which means Day One.

So the boat comes with a driver, right? 

Nope. You can hire a driver for the day but you don't have to. They allow you to drive it yourself. So even though I'd never driven a narrow boat before, I figured if they allow you to do it, it must be perfectly safe, right? I mean they can't really let people drive a boat down a canal if there are repeated issues with first time drivers causing havoc every day, right? Right? Made perfect sense to me.

We got a lesson with our day boat hire from Steve. 

Boat operation instruction? Pretty simple. This is not a complicated machine. You need a key to turn on the boat. Motor starts with the push of a button. Engine goes forward and in reverse. It's an opposite steer craft meaning if you want to go right, push the tiller to the left and do the opposite to go left. There's a lock key included in the boat and if you need to stop for lunch, there are large metal pins that you can drive into the ground with a hammer and ropes to tie the boat to the pins.

Canal navigation instructions? A bit more complicated but not super difficult. Right after we start our journey, there's a one way part to the canal lasting about 500 meters; one person needs to get out of the boat and confirm there's no other boat coming the other way. After that there's a farmer's bridge that will most assuredly be up; but if it's not, you'll need to use the lock key to crank it up. After that, there's another very narrow section of the canal but nowhere near as long as the first section. The Aqueduct is one way and there's a wide spot to turn around after that.

And in case you were wondering...no locks. In fact, the rental agreement prohibits entering locks. Also, no legging required, as confirmed by my Uncle Malcolm.

Steve giving us the pre-departure rundown of the rules of the water.

First task? Turn the boat around. Steve would help us with that. 

Canals are narrow. Narrower than the 75 foot maximum length of a narrow boat (that length is limited by the typical length of a lock; no point having a narrow boat that won't pass through locks) and even narrower than the 32 foot length of our boat (the Dydd Un) carrying us around for the day. So to turn the boat around, we'd need to find a spot where the canal is a bit wider. Fortunately, there are such spots and there was one just a bit further from the Aqueduct than where we boarded our boat for the day.

Turning around? Piece of cake. We came back to the place where we boarded, Steve got off and we were on our own for the rest of the day. Our task for the day would be to motor the boat down to and over the Aqueduct, turn it around, find some lunch and get back before 5 pm. We'd have about seven hours to do all that. Seemed like plenty of time.

And the day couldn't have been better. We always keep a close eye on the weather for rain whenever we are in the United Kingdom and we'd been tracking the possibility of rain in the days leading up to our trip on the water. Sometimes the forecast looked like rain and sometimes it didn't. When we got the actual day, it was gorgeous sunshine the whole day. 

Scenes from the trip to the Aqueduct. This is pretty much idyllic English landscape stuff, no?

You know what? Driving a narrow boat down a straight narrow canal isn't really that difficult. There's no turning required so steering is minimal at best. You don't have to worry about the ducks and ducklings because they will get themselves out of the way. And there's not really that much other traffic on the canal. On this last point, we were probably helped out a bit to a lot by a breach in the canal system to the west a few months earlier that effectively cut off our portion of the canal from the rest of the nation. So no boats coming for the weekend.

There was no boat coming the other way on the 500 meter very narrow section of the canal (yes, we had somebody get out and walk to check), the farmer's bridge was indeed up and we found a similar lack of other way traffic on the second narrow section of the canal. Also, hitting the side of the canal seems to be acceptable; we did it with Steve in the boat and he seemed to think that was normal. And our rate of travel is slower than walking speed.

Got that? Slower than walking speed. When I got out of the boat to check the one way canal section on the way back, I could easily outpace the speed of the Dydd Un.

If there was an initial trickiness about the beginning part of our journey, it was navigating around one or two of the 8,500 narrow boats in the country registered as permanent homes. It is very, very important not to disturb these boats. I can't imagine being asleep in one of these things and having some first-time day driver slam into your boat / house accidentally. NOT how I'd want to wake up. Or wake someone up.

The solution? Slow down to minimize any sort of wake and be careful. As narrow as these canals are, there is easily enough space in an average section of canal to move past another seven foot wide narrow boat with ease.

At the helm (top) and scattering ducklings along the way (bottom).

A couple hours after departure, we got to the Aqueduct. This is what we came to see and it had to be without a doubt the best part of the ride. It was, by the way. Crossing the Aqueduct was incredible.

So first of all, this structure is crazy. And heads up, I'm going to use that word over and over in this section of the post. It is just a touch more than 1,000 feet long and almost 12 feet wide (actually 11'-10" and yes I rounded up earlier in this post to 12 feet). It is basically a cast iron trough with those dimensions supported about 125 feet above the Dee River valley by a series of iron arches spanning between 20 hollow stone masonry piers. From the ground it is simple and elegant.

The crazy part about the whole crossing experience is when you are driving a narrow boat across it and it's all about that 11'-10" dimension and the drop. I don't know how exactly the dimensions of the Aqueduct work out precisely but a narrow boat is about seven feet wide and a walk where folks need to pass each other and have a railing also installed (you know...safety) is going to take a good let's say 3-1/2 feet. Considering the walls of the trough which carries the water are probably 3 inches thick (I'm guessing...I didn't measure but I got awfully close to what I would have wanted to measure), that's not a lot of space on either side of the boat. 

And that's true. Our narrow boat was basically hitting the sides of the trough carrying the water with a 125 foot or so drop on the other side of it. So the boat that we are driving is basically banging into a very thin piece of cast iron over and over again and if it breaks because we keep hitting it then that's not good news. Now, deep down inside, I knew it wasn't going to break. People have been knocking their boats against this piece of cast iron for 200 plus years. Still...it makes you wonder.

This fear is escalated a bit by the view down when you are on the right side of the boat going out and the left side of the boat coming back. Whereas on the footpath side of the Aqueduct, there's a nice comfortably high railing for pedestrians, on the canal side of the structure, there's nothing. It's a thinnish piece of cast iron which is about as high as it needs to be to hold the water (the top of the cast iron is actually below the floor of the rear deck of the boat) and nothing else. No rail, no guard, no nothing. Lean over the side of the boat and look over the edge (which is way possible because you are traveling basically on the very edge of the structure) and it's straight down. It's pretty thrilling. And it's also crazy. This was a once in a lifetime journey. When else am I ever going to do something like this?

I'm posting three pictures of the transit over the Aqueduct below. Check out how close to the edge of the structure our boat is. And it's not like we had much opportunity to be further away. The second picture is a view taken by me extending my arm over the side of the boat and snapping a pic with my phone. Crazy view! But also a great picture of the bolts on the cast iron arches.

So then we had to get back for 5 pm. Which was not really a problem other than mooring the boat twice to spend time at two pubs for lunch (the first wouldn't serve us lunch), the speed that these boats travel at and the canoeists. Of all the dangers we faced on our day on the canal system of Great Britain, people in canoes turned out to be the biggest danger of all. This could have been bad. It wasn't but we (meaning I) sure had some luck on my side a bit.

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is a one way passage. Perhaps that was obvious by my description of the canal being barely wider than the boat above. The way traffic works is that if someone is coming across the Aqueduct, traffic has to wait for all boats, whether narrow boats or other types of craft (like canoes), to cross completely before traffic can go the other direction. And the rule is basically if you get to the Aqueduct and you see someone ahead of you going across, follow them, no matter how far ahead they are. This could make for quite a wait under the wrong circumstances.

We got lucky on both our journey across and back. We followed boats both ways and didn't have to wait. On the way back, we followed a canoe. And like us being first time narrow boat drivers, this dude and his (I'm guessing here...) six year old daughter were clearly first time canoeists. Slow doesn't begin to describe the speed of the crossing here and the swiftness of his passage was made worse by the fact that he kept stopping so his wife (on foot) could take pictures of him.

We finally get across and find a whole line of others waiting to go back the other way and we figure we could pass this dude at a slightly higher speed and keep going on our journey. But he could not maneuver his canoe out of way. He kept being almost clear before zigging back into the way. Eventually, we (again, meaning I) ran out of room and hit the wall of the canal head on. He wasn't ultimately in my way at that specific point in time but those clear directions about steering and reversing at the beginning of the day...not working so well in a panic situation where you are trying to avoid crushing a canoe with a child and her father inside. I'm sure it was not as close as I felt it was. He did, ultimately, let us pass after my cousin's husband asked him to let us pass. 

Was the height of the Aqueduct scary? Not to me it wasn't. But canoeists? Yes. Very scary. As my uncle Malcolm put it (and I'm paraphrasing) "that guy thinking everyone else on the water knows exactly what they are doing is probably a poor assumption."

Canoeists...following on over the Aqueduct and passing others packed to the side of the canal.

We did make it back on time. Barely. But two minutes or so before 5 pm is still on time. I think the speed threw us off a bit. 

Before we boarded the Dydd Un in Llangollen Wharf for our day boat ride, we found a few episodes of a British show called Canal Boat Diaries on YouTube. It's a show hosted by dedicated narrow boat owner and dweller Robbie Cumming who takes his narrow boat all over the United Kingdom in search of local sights. My mother thinks the show is boring and while some of it is definitely on the banal side, I am fascinated by this show. I mean, here's Robbie living the dream of being one with his narrow boat which can take him pretty much anywhere he wants to go in the entire country. Everything he needs is on this 7 foot by 75 foot craft. I love it.

I can confidently say that after spending a day on a narrow boat (admittedly just 32 feet long) that I am not cut out for living for any stretch of time on this type of watercraft. I love the day we spent on the Dydd Un crossing a 200 year old aqueduct with family that I rarely get to spend time with but my personal canal boat diaries probably stop in the end of May 2026. And I'm sure my wife is happy to know that. 

I can also confidently say that this day would have been nowhere near as much fun as it was if we were to have done this as a couple. It would have honestly been all work, all day. Having a crew including an able helmsman (thanks, Louis!) to take charge of the steering for most of the day was a huge relief. 

One day on a canal is probably enough. We made it about as amazing as it could be with the location and the company. Pontcysyllte? Sorted!

The crew of the Dydd Un. At least for one day in late May 2026 anyway.