Gently Down The Stream

Going fast isn’t an option on the Oxford Canal—to the delight of all who cruise this charming waterway

- TARA ISABELLA BURTON

A WINGED GRYPHON IS PLAYING A UKULELE on Broad Street. At the nearby Bodleian Library, a caterpillar dispenses nutritional advice to children in pinafores. In front of the Pitt Rivers Museum, a Mock Turtle leads a lobster quadrille dance. Me? I’m taking in this annual celebration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Oxford University lecturer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll).

I lived on St Barnabas Street from 2009 to 2010, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford University. Every day was a cultural shock as I tried to reconcile English reserve with my American exuberance—a balance that I still am not sure I’ve struck. But today I’m looking at my university home, which sits 60 miles northwest of London, from another angle entirely.

EAGER FOR AN ADVENTURE, a local friend, Sarah Heenan, and I have hired the Hertford, a canal boat, to spend one week cruising the Oxford Canal, an 18th-century waterway that runs from Oxford north almost 80 miles to Hawkesbury Junction. The experience, we’re discovering, is hardly that of Oxford University, with its Gothic towers. Nor is it of Oxford the town, a staid, prosperous place that is unfailingly polite and invariably aloof. For narrow-boaters such as us, the canal embodies a different, less straitlaced, way of life.

“Along a canal,” explains Heenan, who grew up in a nearby Cotswolds village, “you say hello to everybody.”