Overview

First published in 1944, and now reissued with new black-and-white illustrations and a foreword by Jo Bell, Canal Laureate, this book has become a classic on its subject, and may be said to have started a revival of interest in the English waterways. It was on a spring day in 1939 that L.T.C. Rolt first stepped aboard Cressy. This engaging book tells the story of how he and his wife adapted and fitted out the boat as a home, and recreates the journey of some 400 miles that they made along the network of waterways in the Midlands. It recalls the boatmen and their craft, and celebrates the then seemingly timeless nature of the English countryside through which they passed. As Sir Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘it is an elegy of classic restraint unmarred by any trace of sentiment’ for a way of life and a rural landscape that have now all but disappeared.

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9780752451091

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L. T. C. ROLT trained as an engineer, but his fame rests on his classic biographies of Brunel, Telford, Trevithick, and the Stephensons, his superb volumes of autobiography (Landscape with Machines, Landscape with Canals, and Landscape with Figures), his volumes of transport history, and Red for Danger, an account of railway disasters of Britain. He founded the Inland Waterways Association and was instrumental in encouraging interest in Britain's industrial heritage at Tal-y-llyn and elsewhere.

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