A Day with a Canal Lock Keeper

At half past seven on a spring morning, Gareth Pennock unlocks the small brick cottage beside lock number twelve on the Tarnwick Canal and puts the kettle on. Within an hour, the first boats of the day will be queuing to pass through, and Pennock will spend much of the next ten hours watching gates open and close, chatting to boaters and keeping an eye on the water level. He has worked here for nineteen years, and he is one of only a handful of full-time lock keepers left on this stretch of canal.

Locks were the great engineering solution of the canal age. Because water cannot flow uphill, a canal that crosses hilly country must be divided into level sections, with a lock at each change in height. A boat enters a chamber between two pairs of gates; the gates behind it are closed, and water is either let in to raise the boat or let out to lower it, until the level matches the next section. In the late eighteenth century, when most of Britain's canals were built, each lock usually had its own keeper, who lived in a cottage provided by the canal company and collected tolls from passing boats.

The keeper's role in those days was as much about money and rules as about engineering. Keepers recorded the cargo each boat was carrying, so that the correct charge could be made, and they made sure that boat crews did not waste water, which was always in short supply at the highest point of a canal. A careless crew who opened the wrong gates could drain a section, leaving other boats stranded for hours. Keepers had the power to report offenders, and fines could be heavy.

As railways took over the transport of goods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commercial traffic on the canals declined, and many locks were left without keepers. By the 1960s, some canals had become so neglected that they could no longer be used at all. Their revival came largely from leisure boating. Volunteers cleared rubbish and repaired locks, and holiday hire boats brought a new kind of traffic: people with little experience of handling a boat, who needed help and advice. Some canals reopened only after decades of work, and a few are still being restored today.

Today, most boaters operate locks themselves, using a metal handle to open the paddles that let water in or out. Pennock's job is therefore less about working the lock and more about helping people to do it safely. He estimates that around a third of the crews he sees are on their first canal holiday. 'The most common mistake,' he says, 'is letting the boat drift backwards while the water is going down, so that the back of it gets caught on the ledge at the bottom of the chamber.' Such accidents can damage a boat seriously, and in a few cases they have caused boats to sink.

Not all of his work involves boats. Pennock clears weed and fallen branches from the channel, checks the gates and walls for leaks, and reports any damage to the engineers who carry out major repairs during the winter, when the canal is quieter. He also answers questions from walkers and cyclists on the towpath, and on summer weekends he estimates that he speaks to several hundred people a day. Some visitors are surprised to learn that he no longer lives in the cottage, which is now used as an office and a small shop selling ice creams and maps. In winter, when there are fewer boats, he also helps to train the volunteer lock keepers who work alongside paid staff at the busiest locks each summer.

Pennock admits that the job is not for everyone. The work is physical, the pay is modest and there is no shelter from the weather when the queue of boats is long. But he cannot imagine doing anything else. 'Every day is different,' he says. 'You meet people from all over the world, and you are looking after something that was built more than two hundred years ago. I feel lucky to be part of that.' His only complaint, he says with a smile, is that the summer always passes too quickly.