A pastoral holiday afloat in Britain

Imagine waking up on a cabin cruiser moored in the heart of the English countryside and listening to the water gently lapping around the craft. As the early morning sun streams in through the curtained cabin windows, you gradually become aware of other sounds. Ducks quacking, lambs bleating, and cows mooing a reminder they need milking to the farmer whose tractor you hear a couple of fields away. It's a rich rural medley and a magical way to start the day.

When I was growing up in England, our family used to spend a week each summer cruising on the network of navigable rivers and canals that criss-cross the land. It was a special vacation. We would rent a small cabin cruiser that was fully self-contained for cooking, washing and sleeping, and leisurely chug our way through picture-book backwaters of woodland, meadow and thatch.

In a sense, it was a working holiday, because we had to do everything ourselves - steering the boat, operating the locks and raising the drawbridges by hand. But the work wasn't hard and it was all part of the charm. We were tapping into a way of life that's been in the English heritage for more than 250 years.

Although boating on the inland waterways is now a leisure-time activity, the system was originally developed for commerce. Back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, water transport provided a cheap means of moving cargo around the country - raw material for the Lancashire textile mills, iron ore for the Midlands hardware industry, barley and hops for the northern brewers. And everyone needed coal to power their machines. Then the barges would carry the finished products to their markets.

Back in the 1700s when the system was started, canal-mania, as it was called, provided the opportunity for some amazing feats of engineering. Quite apart from cutting 2,000 miles of watertight canals into the land, the creators built all sorts of drawbridges and swing bridges to get from one side to the other, and tunnels and elaborate staircases of locks to navigate the contours of the countryside.

However, the system had one major drawback - it was very, very slow. The average speed of a canal boat was 3 m.p.h. When the much faster railways came along, the canals were abandoned by the commercial carriers and fell into a state of neglect.