Photo-a-Day  (Thursday, 28th February, 2013)

The water looks very brown.

This spot was where people you do there kebbing.

Great shot Jeff. Lovely composition and colouring. I have only been to Crooke once and went in the pub. Sorry to say it was less than impressive. Very grubby and drab. It could be made into a nice place and the surrounding canal bank a nice place for visitors to sit.

Jeff what a great picture.....I called them barges and got into trouble.....narrow boats they are.....wonderful.....cheers!!

Very colourful, Jeff! The fenders are prominent, see:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_(boating)
Definition of fender:-
http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/fender

A barge is the cargo boat which was towed by the narrow boat. These were also where the boaters lived. In the Canal museum at Ellesmere Port, there is a complete interior of one, fascinating.

The water is that colour because of the type of soil in the area. It isn't pollution or anything like that.
It may be hard to believe, but canal water is now of a very high grade. A different story to what it was in the 1960s!

I remember an old guy who used to refer to the Leeds and Liverpool canal as the 'dog broth'.

The Bridgewater Canal in Worsley is the same Gary. Apparently the orange colour comes from iron ore in the ground.

Gary Im an expert on canals, tow paths, barges,and the colour of the canal water and I agree with you it is cleaner because there no factory mucky water flowing into it now.

And in the Crooke area thers no soil are clay that colour to change the colour of the water.

So Im thinking only way the water as changed to brown is because the photo as bee titilated.

Taken from an excellent angle,Jeff.

maggie - 'barge' is normally used to describe a canal boat of 14' and wider. 'Narrow boat' is used to describe one of no more that 7' wide. The terms are used to describe the size of the boat, not its function. Some barges and narrow boats are cargo boats, but many barges, and most narrow boats in use on our canals nowadays, are pleasure craft.
The only narrow boats I know which regularly towed barges were the tugs owned by the Bridgewater Department of the Manchester Ship Canal Company.
I think what you make have seen at Ellesmere Port is a butty - the dumb, or engineless narrow boat pulled by another narrow boat with an engine. Both would have carried cargo, and have had accommodation for the boater and his family. Or you may have been inside Friendship, which was owned by Joe Skinner and was drawn by a mule.

Thank you for the comments. Mick I have checked the original of this shot and the water is this colour.

So good to know that we have a Canal EXPERT on the boards?

30 years of narrow boating, chairman of a canal society for over 25 years.... Not an EXPERT, but I'm very interested in our canals.

Rev David, I think that dave johnson is referring to Mick`s comment at 17:05.

I walked to Wigan this morning and went past this location and the canal was a mucky grey colou just like it always is.

Only reason its brown on the photo is because the colour of the photo as been touched up.

I stick my photo og what the canal looked like this morning on Photos of Wigan section of the forum.

Lovely picture , glorious colours,summer will soon be here!

lizzie, i too have allways called them barges i think its a thing you are brought up with iv' e just asked my hubby what do you call the boats on the canal and he said a barge ha , i told him about comments and he said yea they are long boats but we call um barges ha .

If you have done all that Rev you should know as much as me.

This is all really interesting. Did this narrow boat culture exist when I lived in the area? I don't remember anything about it. (I left England in 1966, but had not lived in the Wigan area, except to visit, since 1957)

Both wide beam & narrow beam "keel-less" boats are classed as barges

Another definition of Fender...

De lights went out
De po was full
So I did it in de fender...;o)

Looks like double parking

lizzie downunder i call them a barge you can also , they are not coming to australia or canada to correct you, i hope not LOL

Lovely shot that Jeff!

Ellen - when you left in 1966 the canals were being closed (the Sankey in 1963), or just simply neglected. Most boats seen in the Wigan area at the time were barges, mainly carrying coal to local mills and power stations. Narrow boats from the rest of the system (i.e. south of Preston Brook, or the Ashton Canal) would find coal to load before they reached Wigan, so they would be infrequent visitors here. Art's right - all these craft are technically 'barges', but the term 'narrow boat' has long been used for those barges of 7' and under.
As for the 'narrow boat culture' - when you left the area most pleasure craft would have been converted ships' lifeboats - being readily available when ships were being broken up on the Mersey. Canal photos of this area from that period show lines of them moored up in places like Parbold and Lydiate. Some ex-working narrow boats were converted further south - often being cut in half to form two boats of about 40' length. Others added extra living space to small fibreglass cruisers originally built as sea-fishing boats. In the 1970s people began to commission purpose-built narrow boats as leisure craft. Canal boating is a contact sport - and steel craft are best able to cope with the inevitable minor collisions with other boats, lock entrances, bridges, etc.. This really took off in the 1980s, and there are now over 30,000 on the system. This has inevitably led to the canals being better maintained - and to abandoned canals being reopened - such as the Rochdale Canal and the Huddersfield Narrow Canal in our region - and even new links being built, such as the one to make the isolated Lancaster Canal accessible via the River Ribble, and the Liverpool Pier Head link between the North and South Docks. Marinas to provide moorings have also proliferated - locally at Boothstown and on the site of Bickershaw Colliery.

I'm a volunteer at Ellesmere Port Boat Museum. I haven't seen any buttys' there but I have been on the Shard which is a 70 footer and has space at the stern for the familly o live in - its absolutely tiny - then there is the engine room which is bigger, then the cargo hull and then the bow at the front. I was going to have a steer of it last month but we felt the boat wasn't behaving well - and of course these old boats do not have a weed hatch where one can clear the propellor without having to take it out of the canal!