There are numerous reasons I love cycling along canals. To start with, they’re generally flat. They also provide great opportunities to get a history fix, courtesy of crowd-free heritage sites that aren’t necessarily accessible by road. My favourite spot on the Basingstoke Canal, for example, is Odiham Castle – the remains of a 13th-century castle built by King John, nestled in a hidden clearing set back from the water. And in Liverpool and Manchester, I’ll never tire of the huge textile mills towering over the towpaths.
But rather unexpectedly, a new destination has become my go-to spot for some canal-side pedal power: the Cotswolds. Both the Stroudwater Navigation, which heads west from Stroud, and the Thames and Severn Canal, which heads east, are lined with mills. Although it’s worth noting this area wasn’t just famous for its cloth but for its dyeing industry, more specifically a red cloth used for military uniforms and coloured with cochineal, a dye made from insects. At Stroud’s Cotswold Canals Trust visitor centre (which, by the way, is a goldmine of information), paintings of Stroud in the 1800s show vast swathes of scarlet cloth laid out to dry on the surrounding hillsides.
