You should never be in a hurry on the canals. I had nowhere particular to be before nightfall, as long as it offered a pleasant rural view and relative peace. In the end I moored not far above the locks, the M1 a white noise in the background, with a view of fields and oak trees. I did some laundry, put my washing line up on the quiet, wide towpath and watched sheets dry in the evening sun.
In the morning I cycled back down the towpath to Watford Gap motorway service station, adjacent to the canal and with pedestrian access through a lorry park. I bought a newspaper and milk. Rolt would certainly have been surprised by the sight of families eating hamburgers for breakfast and men gambling on fruit machines. As I wheeled my bike through parked lorries, there was a whiff of marijuana. I hoped the driver was getting ready for bed and not to be at the wheel doing 70mph.
Watford Gap, that comedy shorthand for the boundary between South and North, is more than a motorway service station. The gap is topographical – a pass between two ranges of hills that has made for easy passage between the Midlands and south-east since Roman times.
There was no motorway in Rolt’s day, but he writes about cruising below Watling Street, the course of a Roman road, now known as the A5 and since superseded – for most traffic – by the M1. The canal also passes below “the main line of the LMS railway” on which steam trains of the London, Midland and Scottish railway chuffed. Now electric Avanti trains speed overhead. Canal, roads and railway all squeeze through this nexus within a few yards of each other.
Culturally, Watford Gap is also a linguistic border, an “isogloss”, marking a change in accents from South to North. According to linguists, north of here there is one less vowel sound. Foot rhymes with strut.
Onwards I cruised, through Crick tunnel and past a wharf which was not used in Rolt’s day but now has services for boaters: water tap, elsan (toilet) disposal, recycling and rubbish bins. The wharf and “new” (since 1939) marina next door are now home to hundreds of privately owned narrowboats. Most seemed to be moored on their pontoons, owners enjoying sociable drinks onboard rather than cruising the cut.