Gargrave, England: The cow that swam a canal

July 9, 2015

Fowlridge, the start of a waterside odyssey

YOU CAN never find the right pub when you want to, can you? I mean, somewhere in Fowlridge there's a pub with pictures of a cow that fell into a canal, swam the length of a tunnel, and was pulled out and revived with brandy.

I mean, things like that happen as often as jet fighters end up in a hedge and, if there were photos to be seen, we wanted to see them. But we never found the pub. And when we stopped at another pub instead, the man behind the bar said he hadn't been there long and had never heard of it.

Buttercup emerged here, wet and blinking in surprise

So, for your benefit and his, the story is that in 1912 a cow called Buttercup fell into the Leeds and Liverpool canal just where it enters Fowlridge tunnel. There are no currents in a canal to push even a cow in one direction or another so you have to remark on the bovine stupidity that persuaded Buttercup to swim into the darkness of the tunnel rather than, at the very least, staying where she was.

And they led her along here and filled her up with brandy. People were happy with their milk for weeks afterwards

The tunnel is 1 640 yards long. That's not much short of a mile. It must have been with some alarm that the farmer at one end saw his cow vanish into it. It must have been with great surprise that people saw it emerge at the other end. But it did and they gave it brandy and took its pictures and the snaps hang still now in the pub. But not any pub that we could find. Not one that was open, anyway, because we tried.

I rather fancy the poor beast wasn't actually called Buttercup at the time. It sounds too good, doesn't it? Farmers have many cows and I've never noticed they know them all by name. But she got into the papers as Buttercup and that made it fact.

We're a long way from Chester and you might reasonably ask how that might be. And the answer is that Britain between Chester and here is full of the industrial towns of the Mersey river and then of Manchester. Not convinced we wanted to spend the day riding all that and then sleeping in Manchester, we skipped the whole lot by train and pitched up in Todmorden. Which we learned is pronounced TOD-m'd'n, just as Fowlridge is pronounced Foalridge, because that was the original spelling.

We spent quite some time in Todmorden wondering what to do next. We could ride high into the hills or we could take the more direct route to Nelson. What we needed was a cyclist to tell us what that direct road was like. But you can never find a cyclist when you want one so we settled for the word of a man on a motorbike.

And he said the road was fairly calm.

It wasn't.

It wasn't hell's highway, it's true, but it was narrow, up a steep valley with stubby cobbled streets and face-to-face houses going off left and right, and it ran into a smaller version of the sort of conurbation that we'd tried to avoid.

It did, though, get us to Fowlridge. And there, the road still busy, two women talking in the street assured Steph that we could dive down to Buttercup's canal and ride along it as far as we chose.

Delightful riding and occasional novelties along the canal

It was wonderful advice, and all the more remarkable for coming from standers-by, not traditionally the most reliable dispensers of cycling wisdom. The canal was a delight, especially when it passed through open country. The surface got more ragged as we progressed until finally it was a bumpy single track through grass banks with a succession of gates. But we were in paradise. Except for the bumps that shook up my broken rib, but I was so happy I was prepared to overlook that.

Impressively precise distances for canal men

Tonight we're camping in Fred Green's Coalyard. Sounds romantic, doesn't it? In fact it's a proper campground on the edge of the stone village of Gargrave, but with a coal and feed business to one side. As neighbours we have a wiry rambler who seems to have stopped rambling and taken up near-residence in a tiny tent, and two noticeably sturdy women in their 30s who appear to be the closest of friends. One warned that she snored and the other wore a T-shirt that suggested she had played hockey for England.

The whole place is run by a jovial man who isn't Fred Green.

"Fred fought in the war and he died afterwards, and then his son died young," he said, collapsing a family tree into a dozen twigs.

I apologised for stringing up a washing line and adorning it with vivid Lycra.

"Don't worry, my friend," he laughed. "It gives the place an air of class."

Today's ride: 62 km (39 miles)
Total: 1,565 km (972 miles)

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