May 2025 Picture of the Month

The colourful tiller and rope bumpers on a narrowboat, photographed some years ago at the Ellesmere Port Boat Museum. Narrowboats are back on my radar on account of the project I am currently working on relating to the 'lost' Somersetshire Coal Canal, for some forthcoming features for Vintage Spirit magazine. The canal closed in 1898, but its route can still be traced, revealing locks and basins buried in the undergrowth. A dedicated team of volunteers from the Somersetshire Coal Canal Society are doing amazing work restoring key aspects of the canal. It was a very narrow canal – the waterways equivalent of a single track road with passing places – in this case basins where horse-drawn boats could pass one another. Next month's image may well reveal some of those surviving fragments. Contax 645 camera, 40mm Zeiss lens, Fujichrome film.