Chris Nelms

We have just returned from a week’s holiday on the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal. We hired narrowboat Country Lass II from Phil and Sue Ware at Country Craft Narrowboats for £684. Our boat was new for the 2009 season and had only been hired for one week previously. We were initially dismayed to discover that the interior of the boat was surprisingly dirty. The previous hirers had clearly kept a dog on board and everything in the boat was covered in dog hairs. No vacuum cleaner was provided on the boat so we had to sweep the entire interior with a broom and dustpan & brush, a job we would normally expect the hire company to do before handing over the keys. Worse, the cleanliness of the kitchen equipment was appalling. Some of the crockery had clearly been used by the dog and was dirty and covered in dog hairs; the cheese grater was encrusted with cheese from when it was last used, and a baking tray from the oven still contained oil from when it was last used. We have hired several narrowboats from other companies and never previously encountered such poor standards.

The fit-out of the boat was competent but unexceptional. Most of the interior was clad in varnished plywood with blue fabric-covered panels on the sides above the gunwales providing some relief from the dark brown wood. The floor was a wood-effect laminate which is a practical floor covering for a hire boat. The quality of the joinery was generally of DIY standard rather than of a professional boat fitter and there were several areas which may prove problematic in the longer term.

In the galley crockery is stored in a cupboard under the sink but a leak from somewhere, we never discovered the source, meant that plates and cookware were usually wet. There was a full-size gas cooker but the push-button ignition didn’t work and the oven door was hinged on the wrong side so lighting the oven or grill involved kneeling on the floor and trying to strike a match with one hand while holding in the control knob with the other. I singed the hairs on my hand several times attempting this. The boat was supplied with a box containing about 12 matches so we had to stop soon and find a shop that sold matches! There was a decent-sized 12 volt fridge with small freezer compartment which kept nicely cold but again the door had been installed with the hinges on the wrong side. This is just carelessness since, like most fridges, the door was clearly designed to be hung from either side.

In the shower room there was an efficient push-button macerator toilet, albeit with a small seat compared with domestic toilets. This sucked the waste into a tank under the fixed double bed. With a family of four the waste tank became full in two days and because it was mounted off-centre the boat developed a pronounced list as the tank filled, causing complaints from the children that sleeping was difficult on a tilting boat. During the initial handover I asked Sue Ware what would happen when the tank filled up and she replied that she didn’t know because the boat was new. We discovered that there was no warning light or problem with flushing the toilet; when the tank was full the raw sewage was merely pumped into the canal through a hole in the side of the boat. We did experience some difficulty in finding places to pump out the sewage tank, but had an assurance from Sue Ware that any pump-out charges we incurred would be reimbursed. In the end we only had one pump-out, from the very friendly team at Castle Narrowboats in Gilwern who made no charge.

On a more positive note the boat was a joy to handle. I would say it was one of the easiest hire-boats to steer that I’ve ever known. When moving forwards it went exactly where directed by the tiller providing there was water under the boat. When the bottom of the boat was scraping the bottom of the canal, as it did regularly, the boat just would not turn left for some reason and we’d end up having to pole the bow away from the bank. In reverse the boat went backwards in a straight line, which is a real benefit and by no means to be expected from a narrowboat.

One thing that surprised us for a boat of this size was the small capacity of its water tank. With very moderate water consumption for a family of four we had to fill up with water every day and plan showers to coincide with water stops. As with the sewage tank, there is no gauge to show the level in the water tank and on our second day we suddenly ran out of water which meant several hours without a cup of tea until we reached a canal-side tap. The pressure of water in these taps varied greatly. Usually there was a good flow and the tank could be refilled in twenty minutes but the tap near Brynich Lock, 2 miles from Brecon, was incredibly slow. We left the hose running into our tank for an hour and a half and still the tank wasn’t full so we gave up and moved on, topping off the tank at Talybont 3 or 4 miles away. There are plenty of water points along the canal so we rarely had any trouble finding one. We took with us the excellent Nicholson Guide: Four Counties & the Welsh Canals and this proved better than the guides provided with the boat. When cruising an unfamiliar canal I always like to have a map so that I know where I am, and how far to the next bridge, lock, village, pub, etc.

The canal passes through breathtakingly beautiful countryside, and for much of its length it follows the contours halfway up the slopes of the Usk Valley, giving an elevated position for views across the valley. (From an engineering standpoint this might be unwise as the canal has suffered repeatedly from landslips that cause the bank to slide down the hill and the water to pour out, most recently in 2007). The canal is never far from villages though so if you don’t mind a short walk there’s usually a pub and shop nearby. We had no trouble getting newspapers, bread, milk and a few groceries.

We didn’t stop at many pubs, having brought our own food and drink because we were uncertain how rural the canal would be, but one pub that deserves a mention is the Bridge End Inn at Crickhowell. We had moored near bridge 118 and this pub is about threequarters of a mile away, down the steep hill from the canal to the road bridge crossing the River Usk. We had to walk through the inevitable crowd of smokers gathered outside around the entrance which is slightly intimidating when visiting an unfamiliar pub but inside the welcome was warm and the beer well kept. The pub was very busy but they found us a table in the restaurant without delay. The menu at first glance looks unadventurous, with many dishes that one would find on pub menus the length of Britain, and the prices weren’t the cheapest, but when our food arrived we forgave them everything. They weren’t standard, bought-in frozen meals that required reheating, the food was proper home-made fare. Louise had melt-in-the mouth Welsh lamb (£13.95) and I had a delicious steak pie with a shortcrust pastry top (£12.95). There was a good selection of vegetables, and the house red was a very pleasant wine for £10.45. Service was attentive but not pushy from an efficient waiter and if we visit this area again we shall certainly return for another meal.

One feature of the Mon & Brec is its shallowness. It’s not a lack of water because the level was always up to the rim of the weirs, and following the 2007 breach millions of pounds have clearly been spent by British Waterways during its 2008 closure on renovating the canal. We were told by Phil Ware that BW are reluctant to dredge the canal for fear that it might trigger another breach of the bank. So for much of its length, even when cruising down the middle of the canal, we would hear the bottom of the boat scraping the bed of the waterway. Regularly we would run aground, and passing other boats could be tricky because we would both have to risk moving towards the side of the cut where the water is even shallower. Inevitably one or both of the craft would run aground and quick work with the pole, plus reverse gear, was required to refloat the boat. Fortunately the canal is very quiet with relatively few privately-owned boats compared with the main network of canals in England. Most of the craft that we passed were hire-boats from the several hire companies along the canal crewed by good-natured holidaymakers like ourselves. Most canals are murky but the Mon & Brec is positively muddy, presumably because of the silt from the bottom constantly being stirred up by passing boats.

At the southern end of the canal, towards Pontypool, the canal becomes even more consistently shallow and much quieter. We cruised for a day and a half without passing another moving boat. At the southernmost point of the navigable canal we moored to take on water only to find that the British Waterways tap was dry. We had hoped to walk further south to follow the line of the canal that is no longer navigable but a local ‘character’ sitting by the towpath eyeing our boat, who looked rather shifty himself, warned us not to leave the boat unattended because it was a “dodgy area and they’ll break into the boat within five minutes”. He didn’t actually ask us for money for him to keep an eye on the boat and keep ‘them’ away but perhaps that was his hope. Anyway we did have a quick stroll across the road to the sad remnants of a flight of locks. I wonder if I’ll ever see this restored.

In its 35¾ miles running from Cwmbran in the south to Brecon in the north the canal has a bit of everything. We were comfortably able to cruise south from Country Craft’s base at Cwmcrawnon down to the end at Pontypool, then head north up to the basin in Brecon, then back to Cwmcrawnon in a week without feeling rushed. There are six locks, the 375 yard Ashford Tunnel which has a very low roof, a few swing bridges, and an electric lift bridge at Talybont that requires the boater to close a gate to stop the traffic on a remarkably busy road and then use a British Waterways key to operate the bridge. A queue of about 7 or 8 cars formed on both times that we went through so one feels obligated not to dawdle. A couple of the bridges are very low, so that the mushroom vents on the roof of the boat only had a couple of inches to spare. This makes steering the boat challenging to say the least because one must squat down on the rear deck and hope that the boat was pointed in the right direction. Even holding the tiller is risky under these bridges because the clearance is so tight that you fear grazing your knuckles.

The shallowness of the canal did present challenges when mooring. There were a couple of canalside pubs where we wanted to stop but just couldn’t get the boat close enough to the towpath. The canal has numerous designated 48 hour moorings with rings or bollards but we just couldn’t get the boat close enough to use many of these. When we could get close we might still need to tie the boat about a metre from the bank and use the plank to reach land. In the mornings the boat would often be stuck fast in the mud and require plenty of revs from the engine plus hard pushing from one or both poles to move the boat back to the deeper channel in the middle.

Overall we had a lovely week on the Mon & Brec and would recommend it as a relaxing canal holiday. Two weeks would probably be too long unless you want to moor up a lot and go walking. The only disappointment was the dirty boat and some hirers might wish to investigate the other companies whose standards might be higher. However this didn’t spoil our enjoyment of a lovely canal.

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I reproduce below an excerpt from Steve Haywood’s book Narrowboat Dreams (Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2008). The book is a lighthearted description of a journey by inland waterway from Banbury, Oxfordshire to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The start of chapter four nicely encapsulates what, for me, is the attraction of owning a narrowboat:

Arthur Ransome, who wrote Swallows and Amazons and knew a bit about this sort of thing, got it absolutely right. He said of houses that they were just badly built boats, so firmly aground you couldn’t think of moving them.

I know what he means. Anyone who has a boat knows what he means. There’s something about the mobility of a boat - especially a boat you can live on - that appeals to something deep and fundamental inside us. It’s the idea that you can just pack up your home and take it with you wherever you want, something that must be connected with our primeval past when we were hunter-gatherers, travelling every day as we followed food, our homes on our backs.

But it’s a childhood thing too. It’s to do with camping trips with mum and dad, the Cubs or the Brownies; it’s to do with the excitement of summer holidays when even putting up a tent in the garden was an adventure. It’s to do with the films we saw then, and the stories we absorbed, about gypsies in their brightly-painted vardos, and cowboys and covered wagons opening up the West, everyone on the move, no one rooted anywhere, every hill on the horizon and every bend in the road a new world waiting to be explored. It’s that thing we had about ‘gentlemen of the road’ - as we used to call tramps then. People who spent their lives meandering in carefree abandon, sleeping in barns or under hedges, their errant lives untrammelled and unregulated by the petty restrictions which limited the rest of us.

There’s a heady freedom about not having a home, because then, paradoxically, everywhere becomes your home-wherever you lay your hat, as they say. Yet you don’t lose that sense of liberation if you have a home that moves. You get the best of both worlds: the chance to wander about, but to sleep in your own bed too. Caravans, I’m told, can give you the same feeling - though their drawback is that they are linked inexorably to roads. And in the twenty-first century roads are busy, noisy hellholes where everyone’s going somewhere only to come back again immediately afterwards. On the canals, the water road is tranquil and calming, and nobody’s actually travelling anywhere properly - just, like me, pretending to go on journeys to give some purpose to their wanderings.

This text is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and the publisher.

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I wrote earlier this year about the simplicity of keeping chickens (see here). I would encourage anyone who is tempted to keep chickens to give it a try because it’s so straightforward. At the end of that post I suggested that beekeeping isn’t the same and I’ve been meaning ever since to return and explain that remark. In one way keeping bees should be simpler than chickens because bees don’t need to be fenced in, they can’t escape in the way chickens can, you don’t need to remember to feed bees or let them out in the morning, and you don’t need to arrange for a neighbour to look after them when you go on holiday. On the other hand bees do need looking after at certain times of the year and if they swarm when you’re not around you risk losing a valuable asset.

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of keeping bees since childhood, and when the opportunity arose of a plot of land in which to keep some bees I grabbed it. I would say that bees are not compatible with an average domestic garden. I know some people do keep bees in a small garden but make sure you get agreement from your family first, and ideally your neighbours too. Sooner or later someone will get stung, and regardless of whether one of your bees was responsible you will be blamed. It’s important that the beekeeper should not offend his or her neighbours. Bees can be very beneficial for gardeners and farmers but no-one wants beehives too close to home.

Having located a suitable site I made a couple of hive-stands out of second-hand timber (see photo above) to keep the hives level on sloping ground. These lift the hives so that fast-growing summer vegetation doesn’t mask the entrance to the hive, and more importantly it saves the beekeeper’s back from constant bending when working on the hives. Even if starting with just one hive, as I did, it is wise to make provision for the apiary to grow. When word gets around that you keep bees you’ll get a knock on the door whenever someone has a swarm in their garden.

Some novice beekeepers are fortunate enough to be given a swarm, and hopefully some valuable advice, from a more experienced beekeeper. In my own case I attended a series of evening classes held by Somerset Beekeepers and then bought a nucleus colony from a national supplier. I drove down and collected them myself from Exeter although the nucleus box can apparently be sent by carrier. Buying a nucleus colony in this way is more expensive but it does mean you start with a balanced, disease-free colony and a queen that has been marked for easy identification. The photo here shows me moving the five frames from the nucleus box into the awaiting hive.

As well as the hive, smoker, and hive tool, one of the most expensive items of equipment is appropriate clothing. It is possible to get by with just a hat, a bee veil tucked inside a fleece zipped up to the neck, beekeeping gloves, jeans and wellies. Most bee-stings seem to occur on the face or hands so these are the most important areas to protect but you need to ensure that a bee cannot crawl into any opening in your clothing and sting you when it feels trapped. I opted to buy a proper bee-suit from B.J. Sherriff as shown here. It aids confidence when handling the bees. Although it is only a thin polyester/cotton material I have never been stung while wearing it which means I can concentrate on my work with the bees. One of my beekeeping neighbours takes a more relaxed approach to bee protection when working on his hives and had to be taken to hospital by helicopter when he was stung about fifty times by his bees! It is a sad truth that the bees don’t realise that the beekeeper is trying his hardest to keep them happy and healthy and housed in a perfect environment.

Once settled into the hive in spring you can leave the bees to fend for themselves, just checking every couple of weeks through the summer to see how they’re getting on. Hopefully they’ll make comb on the frames of wax foundation you provide, and fill the comb with pollen, honey, and baby bees. A healthy colony in full swing during summer is a sight to behold with bees at every stage of their development, and (hopefully) growing stores of honey. One important thing is to make sure the bees don’t run out of space in the hive. If they look cramped you can add another super full of frames to increase the height of the hive and give the bees more room to store honey. If the bees detect a lack of space, or that the queen is flagging, they may swarm, whereby a queen and large group of followers leave the hive with the intention of starting a new life elsewhere.

One of the key challenges for beekeepers is to prevent a swarm. You want your bees to stay at home making honey for you, not fly off leaving you with just a depleted colony that won’t produce much honey. Needless to say I’ve had several swarms. The first two were at the weekend when I was at home and able to catch them but there have I think been others when I’ve been at work. If there are other beekeepers in the area it’s sometimes hard to know where the swarm has come from but the standard rule is ‘finders keepers’. If you catch a swarm it’s yours to keep, to put into a new hive where it can hopefully grow into a productive colony. This photo shows a swarm hanging on a hawthorn hedge about a metre from the ground. In my experience bees in swarms are very well-behaved; shake the majority of bees into a straw skep, put a board on top, invert the whole lot and place the board on the ground with one edge of the skep raised a centimetre with a stick. as long as the queen is inside the skep all the remaining bees obediently walk inside. After an hour or two you can wrap the whole thing in an old white bed sheet and carry it to the empty hive where they will happily set up home.

One of the pleasures of beekeeping for me on a warm summer afternoon is to sit near the hive, making sure I’m not in their flight path. If I sit quite still I can happily watch the bees coming and going, and listen to birdsong. What better way to while away half an hour?

Finally to honey. Strange as it may seem I’ve never been particularly fond of honey. It’s the bees that interest me rather than the honey. Nevertheless at the end of a productive summer each super will contain 20 or 30 pounds of honey. A clearing board is placed underneath these honey supers in the hive; it allows the bees to leave the super but not to re-enter. After a few days the supers should be clear of bees and you can carry them (they are surprisingly heavy!) back to the kitchen to uncap the wax comb with a warm knife and extract the honey in a centrifugal extractor. It’s a messy job. That evening, when the honey is in jars and the messy equipment has been cleaned, sit down and enjoy a slice or two of honey on buttered toast from your own hive. There is no taste like it!

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In May 2007 I was flattered and delighted to be invited to write a guest piece about our experiences of living with an Aga for the Cottage Smallholder blog. I have followed this most readable blog for several years and corresponded with Fiona Neville, its owner, who felt a short article about the Aga would fit in with the other content on her website. You can see from the article that we are fans of our Aga, and it has certainly changed our lives.

Then oil prices changed everything. When oil prices reached over US$140 a barrel in July 2008 our domestic heating oil prices exceeded 65p/litre. Since our 4-oven Aga consumes about 8 litres of oil per day, paying £5.20 per day, £158 per month, £1,900 per year just to run a cooking appliance seemed excessive. Yes in the winter the Aga does contribute useful space-heating to the kitchen but in a hot summer it can be a source of annoying and unnecessary heat that we open the windows to ventilate.

In May this year we took the decision to turn off the Aga for the first time in eight years (apart from servicing breaks) and to cook instead on our Aga ‘Companion’ electric cooker. It’s impossible to make direct comparisons between the running costs of the electric cooker and the oil-burning Aga but the Aga costs considerably more to run. We did miss the Aga always being ready for action, instead having to wait for ages for the electric cooker’s oven to heat up but £5.20 per day just to cook our evening meal was too much.

Since then the oil price has fallen, the global economic crisis sending Brent crude to under US$50 per barrel. Domestic heating oil has fallen back too and today I was offered 1,000 litres delivered for £397 including VAT, so just under 40p/litre. At the beginning of December I relented and we re-lit the Aga. It is lovely to have its warmth in the winter and it is just as delightful to cook on. But the rot has set in. We do feel guilty about running such an extravagant and environmentally unsustainable appliance. To burn a fossil fuel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just to have a cooker instantly ready for action is wrong. When our willingness to run it is determined by the cost of a commodity over which we have no control, and which has changed so much during 2008, surely the days of the Aga are numbered.

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Several of our friends have expressed an interest in keeping chickens and have asked us whether it is easy, so I thought I would post a few paragraphs here about chicken-keeping.  Apparently keeping chickens in domestic gardens has become increasingly popular in recent years, and this isn’t surprising.  It is so easy!  We keep a few hens for their eggs but we have never killed and eaten one for meat.  The children have given them names and they all have their little personalities so killing one would be unthinkable.  Instead we keep them until they die, even if they haven’t laid an egg for over a year, and then bury them.

We bought a proprietary henhouse, although making one would be easy enough.  The particular features of our henhouse that I would recommend are the external nestboxes with a hinged lid so that you can easily check for eggs without bending down and peering into the house, and the roof made of Onduline which is more hygienic than wood covered with roofing felt.  It is handly to have handles so that the house can be moved around the garden or paddock, although wheels would be even better.  Another useful feature is a slide-out floor which saves time when cleaning; we cover the floor of our henhouse with wood shavings that are cheap to buy in a big bale.  Once a week we slide out the floor, carry it to the compost heap where we scrape the shavings off with a trowel, return the floor to the house and sprinkle a fresh layer of wood shavings onto it (about 2 inches / 5 cm deep).  Easy!

In the nestboxes we put a layer of wood shavings (about 1 inch / 2½ cm deep) topped with a thick layer of straw that the hens shape into a cosy nest.  Our hens have a feeder that dispenses layers’ pellets on demand (although they don’t eat many because they are out pecking and scratching on the grass most of the day) and two galvanized drinkers to provide water.  Layers’ pellets are a pelleted feed that contains a complete balanced diet for a laying hen.  Once a week when cleaning the house we also replenish the straw in the nestboxes if required, top up the feeder with layers’ pellets, and rinse out and refill the drinkers with clean water.  The whole process takes about 15 minutes.

As a treat we give our chickens mixed corn.  We were told by a poultry keeper that mixed corn is like chocolate and ice cream for the hens in that it has little nutritional value compared with layers’ pellets, but the hens love it.  We sprinkle about half a jam-jar a day of mixed corn onto the grass for the hens to peck, and while sprinkling we call to them: “chick, chick, chick!”.  Thus they quickly learn to associate this calling with their daily treat of corn which is extremely useful for recovering a chicken that has escaped into a neighbour’s garden.  Escaped chickens are very hard to catch but a chicken trained in this way will immediately come running when called and follow you back home.

A healthy chicken will lay around 200 eggs per year, although this varies between different breeds.  The hens usually produce one egg a day for months on end, regular as clockwork, and then inexplicably they will stop laying for a few months.  Sometimes this decline or halting of egg production coincides with the onset of winter but it can happen at any time.  Then, just as suddenly, the hen will resume her egg-a-day laying as if a switch has been flicked back on.  We have very rarely known a hen to lay two eggs a day, and equally some hens become erratic and perhaps lay 2 or 3 eggs a week.

We keep about six hens which provides more eggs than our family requires, and we either give the surplus away or sell them to passers-by from an ‘honesty box’ dispenser on the fence of the paddock where the hens live.  We do not have a cockerel and one isn’t required for egg production.  Cockerels can appear to treat the hens quite brutally, and they certainly expect to exercise their conjugal rights several times a day!

All the books on domestic poultry-keeping recommend using six-foot high fencing to keep the chickens in and foxes out.  Whilst this is undoubtedly good advice we have never done this.  We have found that a four foot fence will keep the hens in and is much easier to erect by driving in 5½ foot fencing stakes.  The birds can easily fly over a four foot fence but they do not wilfully try to escape if all their needs are met where they are.  Our hens have lived for the last two years in a paddock surrounded by a four foot fence and they have never escaped.  However they are fairly stupid creatures so if they fly up to perch on a gate or tree branch near the fence they may land on the wrong side of the gate or fence when they fly down again.  Therefore we top our gates with loose chicken wire to deter them from perching on the top.  A hen won’t fly up to perch on something unless it looks unobstructed.

At dusk the hens naturally walk into their house for the night without any encouragement, and we then shut the pop-hole to keep foxes out.  In the morning at first light we open the pop-hole and they immediately come out to start the new day. 

In conclusion, if you are thinking of keeping chickens I would urge you to go ahead and do it.  Unlike bees (which I shall describe in another post and which are a different proposition altogether!) chickens take very little effort and provide great enjoyment, as well as lots of eggs.

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