No, I haven’t gone native, that’s what the sign just inside the door says.

The Yorkshire Waterways Museum has an interesting collection of local boats ranging from a reproduction coracle…

… to a Humber keel, descendent of the Viking longship…

… to the Wheldale, the last of the tom pudding tugs.

The Wheldale was built in 1959 which means there are things younger than I am being preserved in this museum. Damn!

There is a story that repeats for many canals – they were built at great expense with the expectation of great profits, and that worked fine for a few decades and then the railway came along and took away the business. That’s not true of the Aire and Calder. In fact the canal company undercut the neighboring railway for the most important cargo, coal, and ended up buying them out. The reason was the tom pudding, a floating tub. These were arranged in long strings of eighteen or so and towed by a single tug. At one time there were may hundreds of tom puddings on the A&C. They remained in commercial operation until the 1980s, but now there is only one tug and three tom puddings left.

When it was time to transfer the coal from the tom puddings to the ocean going colliers, they were hoisted up out of the water and tipped up so the coal ran down a chute into the waiting boat. Here’s a model of that from the museum…

… and here’s the last surviving lift.

It’s now a grade II listed building which means there’s no chance of converting it to a discotheque.

However, just across the canal from the museum is a barge than is being converted to a Mondrian themed floating bistro.

If you find it hard to imagine settling down to a plate of northern food like rumbledethumps or tripe and onions in a Mondrian themed floating bistro you’d be quite right. It’s going to be towed to the Isle of Wight, where decadent southerners can enjoy their tiny portions of something they didn’t mean to order but were too embarrassed to admit to their date that they don’t speak French.

I took the museum’s boat ride around the docks. Here’s a big ship. That would have to duck to get under the bridges on the Aire and Calder.

Even on a Sunday they are unloading industrial quantities of white powder. You can come up with your own joke for that one.

Salt and Pepper again. I’m thinking Paula was right about Pepper.

This warehouse overhangs the docks so you don’t get wet unloading cargo.

Finally the mighty statue of the Giraffe God.

After visiting the museum we set off West along the A&C. The way is lined with nesting boxes for owls.

Owl house
Is a very, very, very fine house