Narrowboat to LLANGOLLEN

We now started our second week of Narrowboat adventure… this time from Whitchurch, England, to Llangollen, Wales. This canal would take us under many lift bridges, through some locks that we would work ourselves, under many stone bridges, through some tunnels, and over a couple of the highest aqueducts imaginable! But the biggest challenge of all – pronouncing the name of our destination! Llangollen looks easy enough to say… except the double L has no sound of an L at all… the Welch say something like a hard C or K sound. So the name comes out something like Klangoklen. (If you look up how to say it, you get a dozen different ideas!) You have to say it with gusto. Fun! (I have to wonder if a Welsh person in Peru would love the Camas!)

Our first lift bridge came very quickly. Cherryl was not excited about piloting the 50 foot boat through the tiny opening under the bridge, so she elected to work all the bridges and locks. All I had to do was drive the boat!

You’re going to see lots of pictures of the roof of our narrowboat in gorgeous scenery… sometimes the water was glassy smooth and it looked like we were just flying along.

This is a cute Dutch family who were on the same route, same timing as we were. We would see them often on our trip.

The bridges look wide enough from a distance… then you remember that the towpath runs under the bridge too, cutting the canal width considerably. Here you see a boat ahead of us, with a foot clearance on each side.

Tunnel:

The first real town on the trip was Ellesmere, once a busy port moving freight off narrowboats.

I love all the beautiful old buildings, but this one especially caught my eye. The sign declares it to be the Ellesmere Complementary Centre. I could imagine walking in and they’d say “You’re looking really good today Bruce! And I must say, you’re handling that narrowboat really well!” Actually, I looked it up, and they do all sorts of services, from facials to piercings and tattoos. Rather disappointing…

The canal has a little spur that leads to the town dock. This is where the freight would be unloaded, with a crane like the one below, and warehoused nearby until moved on.

There were plenty of of narrowboats moored alongside the canals, most of them by folks that live full time aboard.

I had to chat with this guy who was flying a New Zealand flag. He was in fact a Kiwi, but had been living in the UK on a narrowboat for many years.

We moored our boat a few hundred yards upriver from the town.

Sheep, horses, and even a few cows checked us out as we putted along.

The Llangollen canal splits at one point, with the Montgomery canal continuing basically west, and the Llangollen canal heads north. The bridges are all numbered, and here the numbering continues on the Montgomery canal, and the Llangollen starts over with 1. But just to make it less confusing, they add a W to make it 1W. Probably that also means we are now in Wales.

Cherryl at the helm… she didn’t mind driving, but didn’t want to do the scary stuff. So she had to do all the work at lift bridges and locks!

So here we are approaching a lock.

Now the lock has been mostly emptied, and the boat sinks below ground level.

Big heavy lock gates have been working for a couple hundred years!

More beautiful homes:

It was fun to wave at pedestrians…

Our boat was the Song Wren.

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Now we are crossing the Chirk Aqueduct. Running at about 70 feet above the river below, it was built around 1800. The leaky original trough was replaced in 1869, so it is relatively new! The higher bridge adjacent to it is for trains… it is 30 feet taller, and was built in 1848, and had to be rebuilt in 1858. The views from the aqueduct are impressive!

Once over the aqueduct, we moored for a bit, and walked across the structure.

It’s even a bit intimidating to walk across!

Another tunnel:

First (and best) glimpse of the famous Pontcysllte Aqueduct. (I don’t know how to pronounce this one!) It is now a World Heritage site. 1,000 feet long, 126 feet above the River Dee, it took 10 years to build, being completed in 1805.

Finally we get to the Pontcysllte Aqueduct. A bit of pucker factor here! The towpath along one side (added a while after the aqueduct was made) has a nice railing, but the other edge of the canal has none. You look down over twelve stories, with no edge visible from inside the boat!

It’s a long way down!

We were looking forward to that awesome Pontcysllte Aqueduct, but also the cute town of Llangollen at the end of the navigable canal. It didn’t disappoint!

We got to chat a bit more with the cute Dutch family we’d met earlier. We’d see them again in interesting circumstances!

They left Llangollen as the sun was setting… theirs was a 70 foot long boat! Quite difficult in the twisty bits of the canal close to Llangollen.

The town is just as gorgeous as it was reputed to be.

The large building in the photo below is the Corn Mill – now a restaurant, it was a working mill a couple hundred years ago.

Inside the Corn Mill it’s almost as beautiful as the food was scrumptious!

Some lucky ones (with reservations) got to eat on a terrace overlooking the River Dee.

It rained a lot, on and off, the day we set back to Whitchurch from Llangollen. Really the only bad weather on this canal, and it was still pretty!

The canal gets very narrow last couple of miles before Llangollen. It is strongly advised to send someone ahead of your boat, to make sure two boats don’t head into the narrow bits at the same time. There is no room to pass, so one boat would have to back up a long ways! (Narrowboats don’t back up well.) Cherryl chose to walk ahead, rather than drive through the skinny stuff.