Michael Cranmer takes a self drive canal cruise with Black Prince Canal Boat Holidays and discovers a world of Gongoozlers, Twaite Shads, and winding holes, on a date with a 70ft narrow boat called Ayda
She’s a big girl. Her name is Ayda, and I’m about to take her out for week of intimate canal cruising.
I’m always nervous on a first date. Her online photos and statistics are impressive: seventy feet stem to stern – as big as the Flying Scotsman! – and six feet two inches in the beam. Ayda is the longest in the Black Prince fleet based in Stoke Prior, Worcestershire. With three double beds, two bathrooms, a lounge, CH and all mod cons, she’s definitely built for comfort, not for speed.
Immaculately groomed in her royal blue and red, she gently nuzzles against her sisters Sabrina, Eden, Evelyn, and Constance, the golden October sun gleaming on her highlights.
My crew of three and I will be casting off to putter at four mph, along some of Britain’s inland waterways, dug out two hundred years ago by gangs of navigators, to move the raw materials and products of the Industrial Revolution.
After an hour of detailed briefing… “keep her nose away from the cill in locks” and “a turn and a half of the greasing point before you get going in the morning”…and we are underway, almost noiseless, willow fringed banks, a motionless heron regarding us with baleful eyes, swifts and swallows swooping to fatten up on insects before their seven thousand mile sleepless migration to sub-Saharan Africa. This reverie is broken as we approach our first lock.
With a boat the size of Ayda a good crew is essential. One to maneuver, (me), one or two to open or close lock gates and paddles and one to shout helpful suggestions, some of which I hear, some, tactically, not. Consider the figures: width of boat, six feet two inches. Width of lock seven feet. Length of Ayda seventy feet. Length of lock seventy-one feet. Result, a bit of a squeeze.
Apprehensively I line her up to slide into the space, an inch to spare either side, gently easing forwards accompanied by shouts of “slow down, you’re going over the cill!” despite my full and certain knowledge that I am NOT going over the cill, and that my forward momentum is approximately 0.00001 mph.
I smile and give a cheery wave. The shore crew heave the massive oak gates shut and open the sluice to let a biblical flood of water cascade in. I perch on Ayda’s stern, tickling her throttle to “keep her nose off the cill” as we rise, magisterially, to the next level.
Thus we progress, our lock savvy increasing incrementally as we navigate nineteen of them to Worcester, our stop for the night.
Time to pause and study the maps and history books. Just ahead of our mooring is Powick Bridge where Cromwell’s forces overcame the royalists to win the Civil War in 1642. We’re on the Worcester and Birmingham canal, started in 1792, linking their centres to the River Severn, navigable to Bristol, the Spaghetti Junction of its day. Off to our right is Tesco, our meal for tonight? Spag Bol of course.
Day two is scary, starting with a lock on to the River Severn, then north to Stourport. Puttering gently along a dreamy canal is one thing, heading on to Britain’s longest river which can flood at alarming rates is another. Most canals are about four feet deep.
The Severn is around fourteen feet after rain, and rain is forecast. Ayda may be a big girl but she has a flat bottom which makes her very, very hard to manage in fast flowing water with a wind pushing her about.
Key locks are manned by volunteers from the Canal and Rivers Trust and I take advice from the super-helpful keeper. “Life preservers on, head south keeping to the left avoiding the drag which will try to pull you onto the weir. Then turn smartly and head at good speed north keeping to the centre of the river to avoid debris and fallen trees”. Reader, I strap my life-preserver on, make the sign of the cross despite being a non-believer (‘every little helps’, right?), and ease her as directed.
She responds reluctantly, shocked by the churning floody river, but soon acquiesces and we’re off at an eye-watering six mph past Worcester Cathedral and the County Cricket ground.
Snapshots of riverside life. Wide-beamed boats built for far-off shores, rickety platforms tumbling into the water, a lamentation of swans, huge bunches of mistletoe clustered in mighty grey alders, a brace of Mallards preen in slack water. Glimpses of pubs long-abandoned but enticingly marked on our map, ‘Crown’, ‘Royal Oak’, ‘Crown & Anchor’ lead thoughts towards the last stand of the monarchy,
Mooring tonight is at a pub that has survived, The Hampstall Inn. We treat ourselves from the simple menu – Beef & Ale pie, Sausage & Mash with Black Pudding, Butcher’s Faggots, ‘all served with fries’ – while the sociable staff tell of the Terrible Hampstall Ferry Disaster of 1919, which claimed nine lives; nervously back at Ayda I double-check her moorings, and so to a contented sleep.
Post-breakfast we approach Lincomb Lock and Weir. The cheery keeper operates gigantic electric gates and explains how the lock bypasses a ‘ladder’ to help migratory fish – especially the Twaite Shad – reach their historical spawning grounds upstream. As we rise, a vast caravan park looms into view offering ‘Adult-Only’ pitches. Maybe it’s not just the curious Twaite Shad that come here to spawn.
Nature gives way to human existence approaching our exit from the Severn onto the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal at Stourport. Ramshackle cabins, rotting ‘project’ boats that will never be finished -‘Bonnie’, ‘Dell’, ‘Knot Right’, ‘Lizzie’s Revenge’ – two-storey houseboats with more fenders than a guitar shop, flags of St George proliferate, unkempt back yards like a B&Q closing-down-sale.
I execute a nifty ‘S’ turn into the double-locks at Stourport Basin. The sun has brought out Gongoozlers (‘…who hang around bridges to laugh at the inept efforts of less experienced barge folk as they struggle to pass through locks’), but our well-drilled team put on a near-perfect display.
Time to explore this once-thriving Georgian town which, by the late eighteenth century, had become the busiest inland port in the Midlands after Birmingham. Among the ubiquitous vape dens, charity shops and nail parlours, gorgeous architectural gems still survive, with a handful of generational businesses like Gough Family Butchers, ‘…est. 1987, Gloucester Old Spot sausages. Kangaroo, Ostrich, Crocodile Burgers’. I wonder…do they make ‘em snappy?
I point Ayda’s bow due north to Kidderminster leaving sad Stourport behind as nature surrounds our gentle passage. Drooping ash, sycamore and beech turning gold. A conker plops into the water, its ripples mixing with our passing wake.
Then, suddenly, a flash of electric blue and copper. A Kingfisher! I follow its darting flight inches above the water. Highly sought after by I-Spy Book Of Birds spotters but rarely seen. Surely this is what canal boating is about.
Conkers aren’t the only things to be found in the hedgerows. The first mate, perched seventy feet ahead in the prow, shouts “Pull over!” Never one to pass up on Food For Free, she’s off, basket in hand, pluck, pluck, plucking as I throttle back to chug, chug, chug alongside. Sloes, Blackberries, Elderberries, Rosehips, Apples, Damsons, Bullaces.
The overflowing basket is replaced by other containers. Apple & Blackberry pie tonight Shipmates!
The helpful people at Black Prince had warned us “Don’t moor in Kidderminster” while exchanging dark glances with each other. Accordingly, we tie up on the outskirts of town near an extraordinary piece of the history of the Industrial Revolution, Falling Sands Viaduct, where canal meets road and rail.
The viaduct was built between 1875-78, part of the original Severn Valley Railway, which ran from Bridgnorth to Bewdley, now a preserved steam line. Canal bridge number eleven (counted backwards from Kidderminster) is dwarfed by the seventy-foot high arches. A plaque poignantly commemorates the ten ‘navvies’ who died in its construction.
Provisions are required, and we need to turn the boat at this, our halfway point; so we hold a war council and bravely vote to head to Tesco in Kidderminster hoping that the ‘winding hole’ marked there will be big enough to allow Ayda to be rotated. Two will guard the boat from marauders and attempt the delicate operation, while the others buy food and gin (some to drink, some to make sloe gin).
Mercifully the canal is just wide enough as I nudge her nose into the Tesco towpath bank, while pushing her tiller on full opposite lock. No Gongoozlers, no sunken shopping trolleys to foul her propellor, and around we slowly come and head back towards Stourport as the smell of onion soup wafts up from the galley.
This time the river’s flow helps chivvy Ayda into a sharp left-hand junction onto the Droitwich canals. The landscape changes as we enter Coney Meadow Reed Beds. Dragonflies synchronise with our passage as we swish through the reeds which brush us like a natural car-wash. The disembodied voices of walkers on the towpath – invisible behind the reeds – drift in and out of hearing.
At a lock we chat to two Americans, “Our first time in UK, and first time on a canal. Awesome!”. Where are you from? “New York City”. Oh dear, enough said. Droitwich is our final mooring and a jolly fine one. The Romans extracted salt from the vast underground brine deposits which still produce today.
A skein of geese flies overhead heralding winter’s approach and it’s time to say farewell to Ayda. Our date is a success and we’re already planning the next rendezvous.
Tell Me More About Black Prince Canal Boat Holidays.
Black Prince Canal Boat Holidays operates canal getaways from nine bases across the UK, including Stoke Prior in Worcestershire, where short breaks start from £999 (including an early booking discount of £250) for departures in May 2026, based on up to six people sharing a Signature narrowboat.
Fuel is extra and costs around £15 per day. For more information and to book, visit Black Prince Canal Boat Holidays or call 01527 575 115.
