#477 Now Sold

NB Birchills Oak

(£2.50 from the sale of this pen will be gifted to The Black Country Living Museum, the Custodians of NB Birchills)

EUROPEAN OAK - Quercus robur

Usually straight-grained, the heartwood of European Oak varies in colour from light tan to brown. Quarter-sawn pieces show attractive flame figuring. The wood is fairly hard, heavy and dense, clean but with the occasional knot. European Oak is a beautiful timber and with an oil finish, the grain will turn a deep golden brown.

This particular piece of oak (probably English rather than European) is just a little bit special though. It comes from the rear cabin side gunwales and roof hatch of Narrowboat Birchills. I was given a few off cuts by the superb craftsmen who were carrying out a little light refurbishment to this historic boat, in fact the guys had cut the whole back cabin off!

Birchills is an historic, ‘Joey’ boat with a small day cabin, built in 1953 by Ernest Thomas of Walsall, ‘Birchills’ it is one of the last wooden day boats made and was used to carry coal to Wolverhampton Power Station. This boat is double-ended and the mast and rudder could be changed from one end to the other. This enabled its use in narrow canals or basins where there was no room to turn the boat around.

The rotten parts of these rebuilt boats are usually used to stoke the fires that steam the new planks for bending to the hulls shape so half a day later this flaky gunwale would have been burned. I wasn't sure how deep the rot would have gone and how deep I would have to delve into this piece to find stable wood. The pens I make from historic boat materials have been thoroughly tested by me to make sure that they will give pleasurable daily use.

That old flaky gunwale went on to make a few very nice pens and I was lucky enough to be given some more wood by Ade at A P Boat Building in Alvecote. This time a piece that appears to be from the old red cabin hatch surround.

We had stayed in Stratford-upon-Avon basin for our full allowance of 14 days as the weather had been so nice. The plan was that we'd go out for a belated birthday drink and dinner for Debbie on our last night and slowly plod back up to the outskirts of Birmingham in the couple of weeks after.

Debs treat out very nearly didn't happen. We'd had a day of rain, not particularly heavy locally, but I was seeing a lot of bad reports of flooding from fellow boaters a long way east in Northampton. It wasn't until I looked closer at the maps that I realised that the River Avon was a stream over that way and it was the same river Avon that we were 100 yards from.

The river is usually about five feet below the canal basin and the basin itself has floating pontoons and wharf walls about another foot or so above the canal height. Worryingly though there were some flood markers on the town wall that showed the river had the potential to go quite bit higher. We hadn't had that much rain though. Had we?

On the mooring of our last day the river was up by about three feet and the park and bandstand was starting to flood. Sirens sounded in the distance. I later found out that it was the emergency evacuation procedure for a local mobile home park. Maybe we should leave a bit earlier, get through the two low bridges and up the closest town lock and safely above flood height.

It wasn't that we were particularly bothered about the flood, more that if the basin rose by up to 1 foot we wouldn't be able to get out under the bridges and would be trapped for however long the water stayed high. I logged in to the environment agency's web site and looked at the data for the river hight. Worst recently recorded (1995) was about 1.9m with an average this time of year being about 0.7m. It was now 1.6m but wasn't increasing over a couple of hours that I was checking.

We gambled and stayed in the basin. After a great evening out we returned to the boat a little the worse for wear and to a river height of 1.68m. We decided that if the river level rose to basin level of about 1.85m we would move the boat through the bridges and first lock whatever the time of night was. I took the first watch - midnight to 7am, well I'm a light sleeper and Deb doesn't function on anything less than eight hours sleep!  

The level stabilized over night and was just under 1.85m by 6am. Just as we were getting ready to leave a couple of hours later, using the pontoons to do a quick repair job on our sagging front and rear button fenders, the canal and river equalised. The river bottom lock gate gently swung open to show a completely open ended lock with the tree strewn river rushing past just a boats length from where we were moored. Time to leave.

Pen #477 was turned a week or so later just south of Knowle on Friday 18th March

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