Time to go?

By Heather Bell, Posted on March 20, 2026

We’ve been over-wintering on the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. It’s our last week and we’re having one final cruise along its length before putting the boat into the marina while we go off on one of our van trips. When we come back in a few weeks, river levels permitting, we will be heading north out of the lock at Gloucester Docks, onto the River Severn up to Tewkesbury and back onto the main canal and river network.

This month has been tough; our dog Sammy suddenly became very poorly and sadly we had to take her to the vets for one last visit. She has practically grown up on this boat so not having her with us is very hard.

Needing a change of scenery, we escaped for a few days and caught the train into London. On our first night we went to the Duchess Theatre in the West End to see the play called “The Play That Goes Wrong”. Ian was laughing from start to finish. It reminded him of his university days when he was the lighting and stage manager for the Theatre Society. Everything that could go wrong in a performance does go wrong in this one and he was in stitches.

The next day we headed to Tower Hill to explore the city using a themed mystery guide which was both informative and good fun. Then it was a quick dash to Camden Market for Heather to go to her favourite boho/hippy clothing stall and acquire some very jazzy trousers before we zapped back across London to see some films in Leicester Square. Of course Heather went for the heart warming “Mother’s Pride” starring Martin Clunes and Ian headed for a sci-fi something that he’s still trying to work out!

Our last day was spent at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Kew Gardens. I think we were both surprised by their size and diversity, the botanical collections contain over 50,000 living plants. Believe it or not, they employ more scientists than gardeners as the primary mission of Kew Gardens is “to understand and protect plants and fungi, for the wellbeing of people and the future of all life on Earth”

We were lucky to get in to the Palm House as it’s about to be closed for five years for a complete refurbishment and they’ve already started the process of rehousing the plants. Some are to go to other botanical collections around the UK and some will be transferred to a temporary structure, sadly a few will not be saved. So I think we should plan to revisit in five years and see how it all turns out.

Back on the canal, the weather is improving, and we did one more visit to WWT Slimbridge where we were quite surprised to see it almost empty of birdlife. The geese, lapwings and waders have all moved on to find nesting sites, so the main excitement was to see the pairs of kingfishers flying in and out of their burrows. They are so fast and colourful, it was amazing to watch but very difficult to photograph.

This truly is a canal for bird lovers. From swans to tits to numerous birds of prey, there’s always something to spy through the binoculars and you do see twitchers wandering along the towpath with their huge lenses.
As for the 16 miles of the G & S, we have enjoyed our winter here. The length of it has felt a bit claustrophobic for continuous cruisers like us who like to explore new places, but the well managed water levels, lack of locks, manned bridges and the ease of winding (turning) the boat has made it all very easy going.
There have been a few down-sides such as a lack of boat facilities but it’s been manageable with planning. Access to public transport is also poor, so we’ve had to either walk further or book an Uber to get to the train station. You can only stock up with food in Gloucester, and one day we did a “dash” to the shops and cruised the full length of the canal in 4 hours (yes, that’s a speedy 4mph!!).

Overall, it has been a fascinating and safe base for the winter. We have loved our time here, enjoying the views and meeting friendly faces along the towpath and on the water. But our memories of the Gloucester and Sharpness will always be bitter-sweet.

Now we just have to hope, that when we come back at the end of April, the river is not in flood and we don’t meet any big boats on the narrow sections (we still have marks down the side of the boat from that close encounter!).

Mud, Chocolate & Ruddy Ducks!

By Heather Bell, Posted on February 20, 2026

Tewkesbury 10th Feb 2026 picture courtesy of Gloucestershire News

The tow paths are muddy puddles and upstream the rain has swollen the River Severn to the point it has surrounded the Abbey at Tewkesbury! I’m relieved that we are on the canal and not at the mercy of the flood waters. Some of the images on social media have been quite scary. When there have been gaps in the rain, we’ve managed to get off the boat and explore a little more of the local area.

Frampton-on-Severn is a gorgeous village that has a green jewel at its heart. The village green is reputed to be the longest in the country. It is bordered by beautiful examples of 15th century buildings and magnificent Georgian mansions. Several of the oldest houses were rebuilt after a severe storm in 1560 at the start of the “Little Ice Age” which lasted for seventy years. The Frampton Estate has provided the backdrop for historical TV dramas such as Persuasion 1971 and Sanditon in 2019.

Beehive Cottage rebuilt after storm in c1560

The village borders the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. Near to Fretherne Swing Bridge is a mill that was built during World War I by the famous Cadbury family. It helped to meet the growing demand for a new, milkier chocolate bar that had been created towards the end of the 19th Century. This area of rural Gloucestershire was renowned for its dairy farming, but moving vast quantities of fresh milk was expensive and difficult. In 1904, when George Cadbury introduced the new formula that needed more milk, they decided to build the factory closer to the Gloucestershire dairies and this led to the brand name of Dairy Milk Chocolate.

The old Cadbury Factory at Frampton-on-Severn

Where the Staffordshire potteries used the Trent & Mersey Canal to transport clay and bone china, Cadburys used lighters and barges to bring sugar cane and cocoa beans from ports along the Bristol Channel upriver to Sharpness and along the canal to the factory at Frampton. There it was blended and pressed with local milk to make chocolate crumb. It was then loaded onto narrowboats to head north along the River Severn and onto the Worcester and Birmingham Canal to reach Cadbury’s Bournville factory in Birmingham roughly 70 miles (113km) away.

Another blast from the past, but on a personal level, was our visit to the wetland nature reserve at Slimbridge. It’s been fifty years (yes that is a ridiculous amount of time) since we both visited there from a summer scout camp at Tetbury. Ian was a brand new knobbly kneed Scout and I was the ten year old nightmare daughter of the Scout Leader. This time it was a short walk from Patch Bridge to the visitors centre, The only part that we could both recognise was the high viewing tower at the entrance. To say that this wetland reserve has changed is an understatement, it’s now a fabulous maze of walkways and hides overlooking a patchwork of pools and lakes.

We saw deceits of Lapwings, coils of wigeon, rafts of ruddy ducks, lamentations of swans and gaggles of geese! There were no murmurations of starlings but strangely there was a flamboyance of flamingos. They were bit smelly though as they were all hiding together in their heated accommodation. At teatime we went to see Tilly, the resident otter, chasing after her food, sadly she was on her own as she waits for a new companion to arrive at her holt.

Talking of “wetland”, there’s currently 100 flood warnings in place across the UK due to the current blocked weather pattern causing endless rain. The River Severn is graded as dangerous and the lock at Tewkesbury, that we need to use to get on to the River Avon in April, is currently under water. For all those people who were praying for rain to keep the waterways navigation open last year, I think your prayers are being answered! I’m currently happy if I can find a stretch of towpath that isn’t a muddy swamp!

Webcam shot of Tewkesbury Lock to get onto the River Avon

There was no where to go!

By Heather Bell, Posted on November 10, 2025

We’ve finally made it south of Tixall Wide on the Staffordshire & Worcester Canal (S&W) and it is simply stunning. The canal meanders through wooded valleys beside a curtain of red sandstone and we’ve already planned to come back this way to spend time in the picturesque mooring spots that we’ve now pencilled into our 14 year old (but still looks brand new) Nicholson Guide book.

We’re heading to the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal, it’s one that we haven’t been able to reach before so we intend to explore it over next six months or so. The boat is already in winter mode, the cratch cover is down and the bow is has been turned into a store room; full of coal and scavenged wood. The coal cage is being kept lit in the multifuel stove keeping the boat warm, and even the barefoot boater has got his shoes and socks on! Cruising along the canal in the autumn is like drifting in a pot of leaf soup, the floating leaves stick to the propeller smothering the blades, reducing power and steerage, so the odd little bump is inevitable as you try to steer into locks.

The autumn colours are set against moody skies bringing sudden bouts of heavy rain and gusts of wind. We‘ve really enjoyed being on the S&W, the trip down has been peaceful and gentle, that is until we joined the River Severn. Oh boy, that was a rude awaking.

We thought we were experienced and competent river cruisers having spent a lot of time on the Thames over the years, in a range of craft and in a variety of conditions. But the River Severn has a completely different character and attitude. Although the water levels were back down to green, after running high following a couple of weeks of rain, the flow was faster than normal (we were told this by a local boater) and we were heading downstream fast. This was in our favour except for on the two occasions when we very nearly came a cropper.

On rivers it is always advisable to moor with your bow facing upstream, so when leaving our mooring we needed to turn the boat downstream again. We were on the pontoon mooring above Diglis Lock at Worcester, which is opposite the channel to the weir and foolishly didn’t realise (it is very deceptive) how strong the flow was. You’ve guessed it, we didn’t reposition away from this channel before attempting to turn the boat around and got pulled sideways rather violently onto the floating bouys that stop boats from being dragged onto the weir itself. It was frightening and a real rookie error, our little engine did its best but in those few moments of pulling away from the pontoon, the prop had got stuck with leaves so there wasn’t a lot of action happening. But we survived. It was, we thought, probably the scariest moment we’d ever had in our boating careers. Unfortunately there was another incident to follow;

A couple of days later we were booked into Gloucester Lock, all of the locks on the River Severn are huge and manned, but this was the only one that was restricted to weekend opening hours and had to be prebooked. About 3 km from the lock, the river splits and the channel to the lock is narrower, shallower and a bit bendy. We’d previously been warned that a big boat would be coming upstream and would be leaving the Gloucester Lock just after 9am, it was now approaching 11am and as instructed we’d phoned ahead to confirm our arrival. During the call no one mentioned the big boat, we were just told that a second narrowboat was following us and would join us in the lock. We hadn’t seen the bigger boat on the main river so assumed it had either cancelled or had already completed its transit and was moored in one of the boat yards that we’d passed earlier. This was not so.

We were already in the channel when we met the little pilot boat that was travelling ahead of it, advice was shouted to us to keep across to the side as much as we could, which we did. I dashed down to the bow to keep a look out and you can tell from the pictures what happened next.

The boat appeared around the next bend, it was huge and travelling at full throttle, the water was really too shallow for it and its prop was partially out of the water. As it started to pass us we got pulled side on to it, with our boat bouncing along its fenders until we came level with it’s stern. At this point the force of the water from the big boat’s propeller forced the bow of our boat into the trees, the flow of the river and wake from the big boat then threw our stern across the channel. We were left side on to the current and fending off the trees and branches that were crashing through the cockpit of the bow. How we didn’t lose the cratch, aerials, chimney and me, I’ve no idea. I just remember frantically trying to unhook the bow from the vegetation, grabbing and pushing the branches away. I really did think we’d had it. The boat was almost completely across the river and soon it would be tilting over, with the boat that was following us crashing into us. But suddenly, the bow was freed and swung out back into the river and Ian, bless his toe socks, managed to regain control.

You can imagine how relieved we were to see the lock gates opening ahead of us. We later found out that the captain of the big boat had been strongly advised not to proceed, he’d refused to listen, but as he’d left the lock just after 9am, the lock keeper had assumed he would be well clear of the channel before we turned into it, which is why we weren’t given any warning when we phoned.

Waiting for Llanthony Bridge to rise in Gloucester Docks

So following our close encounter of the “weir” kind and nearly being washed out by a big boat in a narrow channel, we are hugely relieved to be tied up on the canal side of Gloucester Docks. Incidents like that really make you appreciate the joy of being still on calm waters!