The Slowest Two Miles: Walking a Narrowboat Through Three Locks on a Grey November Saturday

Some Saturdays need a plan. This one needed a flask, a pair of boots and a willingness to walk at the speed of water.

We set off along the towpath with no grand ambition beyond two miles and a bit of fresh air. The canal was doing its usual November trick: grey sky, brown water, leaves stuck to everything, and that peculiar quiet you only get beside a waterway in the colder months. Holly had made coffee. Joe had remembered the biscuits. We were, by our own modest standards, prepared.

What we hadn't prepared for was the boat.

The lock keeper's invisible baton

We caught up with a narrowboat at the first lock. Not literally, obviously. We were on foot, ambling, and it was making the kind of progress that makes a tortoise look frantic. A couple on board were working the gates while a friend on the bank handled the windlass. They spotted us watching and asked, quite casually, whether we fancied giving them a hand.

This is the thing about canals. Ask a stranger for directions in a car park and you get a polite shrug. Ask a stranger to help push a lock gate that weighs roughly the same as a small shed and they'll roll up their sleeves before you've finished the sentence.

So we learned the choreography. One person opens the paddle on the top gate. Water starts doing its noisy, swirling thing. You wait. You always wait. Then the gate swings open, the boat edges in, the paddles go down, the next set goes up, and the whole business repeats itself with the patience of a very slow dance.

There is no rushing a lock. You can try. You will simply look silly standing there with your hand on a windlass while several tonnes of water take their own sweet time.

Two miles is plenty

Once the boat was through the first lock, we walked ahead. The towpath was muddy in that soft, squelchy way that makes you glad you wore the ugly boots. A heron stood in the shallows looking deeply unimpressed by all of us. A dog in a little coat trotted past with the confidence of someone who owned the entire canal. We drank our coffee and said, more than once, that we should do this more often.

At the second lock, the same couple waved us over again. By then we felt like old hands. Holly took the windlass. Joe did the gate. A man walking the other way stopped to help without being asked, then carried on with a nod. That's the other thing about the canal: it hands you small, useful roles and expects you to take them seriously for about ten minutes at a time.

The bridge holes were our favourite bit. You duck under these low, dark arches and the world goes briefly muffled, like someone has turned the volume down. Then you come out the other side and there's another stretch of water, another bend, another boat with a name like Slow Motion or The Mistress painted on the side.

We didn't make it far. Two miles, maybe a little more. It took us the best part of the afternoon. Neither of us minded.

The pub that arrived exactly when it was needed

By the third lock, the light had started to go that soft, tinny grey that November does so well. We were colder than we'd admit and hungrier than we'd planned. And then, as if someone had written it into the script, a pub appeared at the end of the towpath with a sign swinging in the breeze and a warm window full of people.

We had chips. We had something hot to drink. We sat by a radiator and listened to a table of blokes debate the correct way to moor a boat, which is apparently a subject capable of sustaining forty minutes of lively disagreement.

Nobody looked at their phone. Nobody suggested moving on. It was, in the end, the whole point of the day.

What the slow lane taught us

The temptation with a Saturday is to fill it. To get somewhere, do something, tick it off. But walking beside that boat taught us something simpler: some of the best days are the ones where you let the pace be set by something else entirely. A lock. A river. A couple of strangers who needed a hand.

We came home muddy, slightly cold and very pleased with ourselves. The flask was empty. The biscuits were gone. And we'd walked the slowest two miles we've walked in ages.

We'd do it again next weekend, if the weather lets us.