Boater by  Jo Bell: I sold my home to buy a narrowboat

What should you do if you feel overwhelmed by all that clutter in your house?

For archaeologist Jo Bell the answer was simple: get rid of almost all your possessions and move to somewhere that is just 7ft wide and 65ft long, where you can ‘stay in motion but always be at home’. In short, get a narrowboat.

After working on a project to conserve a collection of canal boats, and spending time living on boats, she began to feel ‘encumbered’ by her tiny cottage near the Stratford canal. ‘I didn’t have much, but it felt too much,’ she writes.

Bell decided to sell the house and buy a narrowboat instead.

Narrowboats, designed to navigate locks and canals, are skinnier than barges. To confuse narrowboats and barges ‘is like mistaking a whippet for a St Bernard’, Bell says sternly.

People who travel on narrowboats are called boaters, not sailors, and saying ‘river’ instead of ‘canal’ is a terrible solecism.

Bell regards Britain’s canals – most of which are no more than 5ft deep – as ‘one of the great achievements of human endeavour… more precious than Stonehenge’. In the 18th century, as rutted roads made transporting goods cumbersome, the idea of a network of canals became increasingly attractive.

Privately funded canals linking rivers such as the Trent, Mersey, Thames and Humber were built in a decade.

The sturdy green and red boat that was to be Bell’s new home was named Tinker. She rather skates over the bathroom arrangements but says that, contrary to popular belief, narrowboats aren’t freezing cold in winter. If anything, the small space tends to get overheated thanks to a log-burning stove.

Her early months as a boater were full of trial and error, but gradually she got more confident, even mastering the knack of hovering mid-channel with perfect control while waiting for a lock to open.

(The double mitre canal lock, still in use today, which uses the force of water to keep the gates sealed, is one of the great Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions.)

She makes life on a boat sound a tremendous adventure. Light raindrops on the roof sound like grains of rice rattling on a tin tray. Friends with babies love visiting as the rocking of the boat sends the most fractious child to sleep.

The canal network, Bell writes, is a magical place, ‘a parallel country with its own landmarks and place names’. After 12 years she reluctantly replaced Tinker with a new boat, called Stoic. It seems Bell will never give up life on water, where she and her fellow boaters travel at three miles an hour and ‘navigate by different stars’.