Daily Times

Self-catering holidays in the UK are booking out fast – so this might be the year to consider hiring a boat, whether it be a self-drive motor cruiser or canal barge.

You’ll have your own, ready-made bubble and for first-timers it’s a chance for a gentle adventure.

Some jaunts afloat involve brawny duties such as winding lock gates open and shut. On others you just relax, take things easy on the water and explore.

Here is a pick of boating holidays on canals and other waterways in the UK, plus more ideas elsewhere around Europe. None requires previous experience.

Wide, watery expanses, scattered woodland and reedy green marshes teeming with wildlife. These are the Norfolk Broads, England’s classic boating country, which can properly be explored only from the water. Shallow lakes are connected by hundreds of miles of artificial waterways sprinkled with quaint villages, riverside inns and the occasional stately home.

Unlike on a canal, there are no locks to negotiate, only posts and buoys marking the channels. In a slow, laid-back week on a cabin cruiser you can expect to discover just a small part of this hidden world. Nature lovers are entranced by diving otters and jumping fish, while dragonflies whine and herons watch from springy islands.

Bath and Bradford-on-Avon are beauties, and a dally journey through the Vale of Pewsey along the Kennet and Avon Canal is about as enchanting as a narrowboat holiday gets.

Add the soaring Avoncliff and Dundas aqueduct spanning the Avon valley, and you begin to appreciate the ingenuity of those 18th and 19th-century canal engineers. That is before you even reach the astonishing flight of 29 locks climbing 250 ft up Caen Hill near Devizes.

There are numerous canalside options for a socially distanced pint on the bank. Several – such as that peach of a pub at Honeystreet, near Pewsey – are called The Barge Inn. No wonder the Kennet and Avon Canal, constructed to link Bristol, via the Avon, with Thames tributary the Kennet, is an all-time favourite.

If Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men In A Boat, was this summer to retrace his 1889 route, he would find a lot still familiar. The rib-tickling classic took in Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, Monkey Island and the famous Oxford colleges. In recent years the Thames has become cleaner, with wildlife returning. Jerome would be amazed by an upgrade from his rowing boat to the wide-beam river vessel Candlewood. Especially welcome would be the boat’s luxurious galley and living area, and the two sumptuous cabins with Egyptian cotton sheets.

In canal boating lingo, a ring means a circular route. The Midlands Ring is a superbly varied two-week wander through four counties. Starting at Gayton on the Grand Union Canal in Northamptonshire, you float through idyllic countryside for the first few days.

Then, chugging on through Warwickshire and Staffordshire, you find yourself in a living heritage museum of the great canal age and Industrial Revolution.

The ring takes in the Trent and Mersey, Coventry and Oxford canals. Arrive back where you started after 115 locks and countless aqueducts and tunnels.

With its purple-headed mountains, craggy fells and thundering waterfalls, the Lake District is higher in elemental drama than anywhere in England. But it is the sinuous stretches of water that lend this region its name and, more than anything, draw visitors from all over the world.

This year will be much quieter – all the better to rent a luxury electric boat for a series of day trips. Discover the mysteries of the largest and most alluring lake of all, Windermere. To glide over the glassy surface helps you understand how Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets found inspiration.

The majesty and history-soaked romance of the Scottish Highlands unfurl along the Caledonian Canal. For 60 miles this waterway cuts through the rugged landscapes of Great Glen, between Fort William and Inverness, connecting a string of lochs. Ben Nevis is the breathtaking backdrop as your live-aboard motor cruiser wends its way east and climbs eight-lock Neptune’s Staircase. You pass Fort Augustus and Urquhart Castle at the edge of Loch Ness before reaching Inverness and heading back. On a week’s return voyage, there is plenty of time to moor up and bag a Munro or two. Or just to sit and drink in the sublime beauty while looking out for wildlife.

Purr rather than putter the length of Britain’s only canal offering electric narrowboats. The Monmouthshire and Brecon is scenically stupendous. The canal cuts 35 glorious miles through the mountains of South Wales between Pontypool and Brecon, partly in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

Punctuated by the occasional waterside pub and with few locks, this is canal boating at its most relaxing. You take it at a dawdling pace because the speed limit is 2 mph. The area is also a Dark Sky Reserve.

Mysterious and mythical Lough Erne is two lakes connected by the River Erne. Enniskillen town and its walled castle straddle this splintering river.

Some 150 wooded islands are strewn across the maze of interconnecting lakes, rivers and backwaters. A few, which you can chug up to on your motor cruiser, have long histories of habitation: Devenish Island has the ruins of a 12th-century monastery.