Narrow Boat

This famous book has become a classic on the subject of the English waterways. It is a fascinating record of how Mr Rolt and his wife adapted and fitted up an old barge, Cressy, as a permanent home and journeyed some 400 miles along the intricate network of waterways in the Midlands. More than that though, it is a celebration of an almost lost culture of boatmen and the rural landscape beside the canal banks. But although that way of life has receded more and more into the past since the book was first published in 1944, it is an English tradition of which, as H.J. Massingham writes in the foreword, `the spirit is immortal and cannot altogether die... it is part of the soul of England...'