Silsden Boats offers family narrow boat holidays, weekend and short breaks on the canals across the Yorkshire Dales including the Leeds and Liverpool canal.Our luxurious range of narrow and wide-beam canal boats all come equipped with full central heating, hot water, toilets, showers and a full tank of fuel. We even welcome pets.
So if you are looking for a relaxing canal holiday set in the beautiful countryside of the North Yorkshire Dales, travelling along the scenic network of canals – then Silsden Boats boating holidays should be your first choice.
You may find the following information about the growth of the canal systems in Britain for leisure use interesting background information. if not you may browse our canal narrow boats for hire on the canals and waterways of Yorkshire, book a canal boat holiday online or request a brochure from us.
Silsden Boats
Booking Hotline: 01535 653 675
In the latter half of the 20th century, while the use of canals for transporting goods was dying out, there was a rise in interest in their history and potential use for leisure including holidays. A large amount of credit for this is usually given to LTC Rolt, whose book "Narrowboat" about a journey made in nb Cressy was published in 1944. A key development was the foundation of the Inland Waterways Association, and the establishment by some boatyards of a fledgling weekly-boat-hire companies, following the example of such companies on the Norfolk Broads, which had long been used for leisure boating.
Holidaymakers began renting 'narrowboats' and roaming the canals, visiting towns and villages they passed. Other people bought boats to use for weekend breaks and the occasional longer trip. The concept of a canal holiday became even more familiar when the large agencies that dealt with Broads holidays began to include canal boatyards in their brochures. Canal-based holidays became popular due to their relaxing nature, self-catering levels of cost, and huge variety of scenery available; from inner London to the Scottish Highlands. This growth in interest came just in time to give local canal societies the ammunition they needed to combat government proposals in the 1960s to close commercially-unviable canals, and to resist pressure from local authorities and newspapers to "Fill In this eyesore" or even to "Close the Killer Canal" (when someone fell in one). It was not long before enthusiastic volunteers were repairing unnavigable but officially-open canals and moving on to restore officially-closed ones and demonstrating their renewed viability to the authotities. It is said that the real breakthrough came when the British Waterways Board came to realise that income from the licence of a leisure boat is just as real as income from a "real" working boat.
Local authorities began to see how a cleaned-up and well-used waterway was bringing visitors to other towns and waterside pubs(not just boaters, but people who just like being near water and watching boats (see gongoozler). They began to clean up their own watersides, and to campaign for "their" canal to be restored. As a result of this growing revival of interest, there are now even some new routes under construction for the first time in a century, linking navigable rivers and existing canals. Large projects such as the restoration of the spectacular Anderton Boat Lift, or the building of the startling Falkirk Wheel attracted development funding from the European Union and from the Millennium Fund. A project called the Jubilee River, which diverts flood waters from the River Thames in Berkshire, is already open but it was designed to look and act like a natural river, and it is not generally counted as a new canal.
There are now thousands of miles of navigable canals and rivers throughout Great Britain. Most of them are linked into a single English and Welsh network from Bath to London, Liverpool to Goole, and Lancaster to Ripon, and connecting the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the estuaries of the Humber, Thames, Mersey, River Severn, and River Ribble. This network is navigable in its entirety by a narrowboat (a boat 7ft wide) no longer than about 56 feet. There are also several significant through-routes not connected to the main network (eg Glasgow to Edinburgh via the Falkirk Wheel, and Inverness to Fort William via Loch Ness.
The aim of campaigning bodies such as the Inland Waterways Association is to persuade British Waterways (which owns about half of Britain's inland waterway network) to fully reopen all disused canals. In May 2005 The Times reported that British Waterways was hoping to quadruple the amount of cargo carried on Britain's canal network to 6 million tonnes by 2010 by transporting large amounts of waste to disposal facilities.
A recent (August 2006) announcement of a budget cut for British Waterways has worried some that development of new waterways, and even maintenance of existing canals might suffer. Alternatively, fees for licences paid by boaters and marinas may rise sharply. One legal problem is that some currently-open waterways still officially only have "remainder" status, so a cash-strapped BW would have no legal obligation to maintain them. Another issue affecting the future of the canal system is whether the UK government will ask the EU for an extension of the "derogation" from the EU rule on fuel tax on private pleasure boats. Unless the government applies for this (and the EC grants it) then canal boats will become ineligible for low-taxed "red" diesel. If canal boats became subject to the same relatively high fuel taxes as motorists then the popularity of canal holidays might decline: for instance, if hire companies might feel that they could no longer afford to subsidise high-speed and high-mileage boaters by "including free fuel" - and to charge fuel as an "extra" would be unpopular with potential hirers.
Definitions and Text Credit: Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
