Long Boat Holidays in England

Do you fancy a long boat holiday on the English canals? Do die-hard boating enthusiasts correct you on your terminology? The boats that travel on the British canals and rivers are called narrowboats. People commonly mistake narrowboats for ‘long boats’ and the term reminds me of ‘long ships’; the name given to Viking boats. In contrast to those, a long boat was actually an open boat rowed by eight or ten oarsmen back in the days of sea going sailing ships. But that kind of rowing sounds like very hard work compared with the reality of a hotel boat holiday on the English canals. The variety of city-scapes and stunning rural scenery can be enjoyed at a leisurely pace, and on a hotel boat you don’t even have to do anything strenuous, but many of our guests do enjoy helping out with the locks.

Snipe & Taurus are both 70 feet long and 7 feet wide, and just like historical working narrowboats they are decorated with charming roses and castles and polished horse brasses. Each cabin is self-contained with it’s own washbasin, hot and cold running water, wardrobe, fresh linens and towels and there is a shower on Snipe and flush toilets on both boats. So you will find your stay on these hotel boats a little more luxurious than a Viking long ship or an oar powered rowing boat! There are full en-suite facilities in both the twin and double cabins, and now a brand new fully en-suite single.

Of course, if you like to be outdoors absorbing the view there’s room to sit in the well decks or on the cabin roof, and if you’d like to be more active than that you can choose to walk on the towpath, perhaps returning on board for tea and a freshly baked cake in the afternoon.

But when Neil, Corrine and the crew serve you up a four course meal around the large family table in the evening that’s when the conversation gets flowing. Perhaps you’ll have a glass of wine and launch into discussions of the correct names for boats. When is a barge a narrowboat? What is a Dutch barge? And when should a narrowboat be called a narrow boat? After dinner, you may carry on the conversation at a nearby canal-side pub with your fellow hotel boat guests. But the real reason it might be called a ‘long-boat holiday’ is because you may find that your perception of time slows down so much on the canals as you relax and unwind, that even if it’s only a few days, it feels like a long boat-holiday!

Peggy Melmoth
www.peggymelmoth.wordpress.com