Pedalling the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

Built by Thomas Telford in 1795, the famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carries the Llangollen canal at a phenomenal height of 126 foot above the River Dee. Walking over it is an experience you remember. The moment you step out along the 1007ft chasm and look down, your legs feel like jelly and (at least in my case), the only way to reach the other side is to hang tightly onto the railing and fix one’s eyes on the other end.

The British Waterways Canal Guide writes enticingly that “the excitement to be derived from crossing this structure by boat is partly due to the fact that, while the towpath side is fenced off with, albeit widely spaced, iron railings, the offside of the canal is completely unprotected from about 12in above the water level.”

So, inspired by this, we drove up to Llangollen last weekend with our 17 foot Winsome pedal boat on the roof. We launched over the bank at Chirk and pedalled Winsome the 3 or 4 miles to Froncysyllte and on across the aqueduct to Trevor. We had a great time but the actual crossing of the aqueduct was slightly disappointing. It was certainly a far less thrilling experience than crossing by foot – in fact neither of us felt even the slightest hint of vertigo at all. We were left puzzling why this might be. Our conclusion was that, from the boat, we couldn’t look vertically down, only at an angle and that doesn't induce vertigo. It’s also possible that, by sitting in a boat, we didn’t have any of the usual fear of falling.

I tried to find some commentary on this effect on the Net but, so far, have only found a bunch of aircraft pilots swapping stories about their fear of heights. They are quite entertaining….

“Any kind of flying, I'm fine. That includes open cockpit microlights, gyroplanes which are like aerial motorbikes, and even hang gliding (though I never got beyond tethered flight). But I have trouble climbing ladders, and when I went tall ship sailing I absolutely refused to climb aloft to the crows nest. No-one could believe a pilot would be almost the only person who never went aloft even by the end of two weeks, but just looking at other people up there made me feel sick. Fear of falling? I don't know, but it makes more sense than anything else.”

“Bizarre. I thought it was just me! I can't bring myself to ride my bike over the Dartford Bridge (I can just about get myself to drive over in the car), yet the other day I was quite happily doing a tight turn over it at 1500' whilst looking down the wing and thinking 'there's that bridge I can't ride over'.”

Meanwhile, I wonder what swimming over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct would feel like and whether anyone’s done it.

Winsome Pedal Skiff

This is the 17 foot Winsome Pedal Skiff which we have been developing with Nick and Matt Newland of Swallow Boats of Cardigan. This is the prototype. The product version is due to be launched in August 2006. We've demonstrated her at 4 Boat Shows and pedalled a few hundred miles in her in a variety of locations including: Monmouthshire and Abergavenny canal, Llangollen canal, Norfolk Broads, Teifi Estuary at Cardigan, River Thames at Henley and the River Severn at Worcester. She was reviewed in Autumn 2005 by Watercraft Magazine.

Winsome, Gender and Technology

We’ve spent the last 3 days at the Thames Boat Show marketing our pedal skiff ‘Winsome’ which we’ve developed in partnership with Swallow Boats Ltd.

Winsome (named after my late aunt) is a 17 foot elegant pedal boat which two people can propel in a relaxed and laid back fashion whilst sipping wine or reading the Sunday papers. You can see more about the product here.

The Thames Boat Show focuses on traditional looking wooden boats and kits and the clientele is usually fairly heavily dominated by men often trailing slightly reluctant looking wives and kids. However, we were delighted to discover that Winsome seems to appeal to women just as much as men – maybe even more. I was also intrigued by the fact that the visitors at the show revealed such marked (but familiar) gender differences in the kinds of questions they asked about the boat – both before and after they tried it out.

The men focussed on the technical questions – “What gearing ratio are you using?” “What size is the propeller?” “How many knots will the boat do?” and “What material is the gear box housing?” Meanwhile, the women (equally engaged) focussed on asking about the kinds of places you could go in such a boat, how many of the family could come along and the kinds of trips we had already done.

This is exactly in line with research studies I have done recording men and women conversing about a range of technical artefacts. Although the popular view is that men are more interested in technical artefacts than women are, we actually found no disparity in the levels of interest. The difference was that the men’s interest focussed on the technology itself – its features, its performance and how to operate it. In contrast, the women showed little or no interest in features or performance. They enthused about the uses they had found for an artefact – i.e. the interesting or useful things it enabled THEM to do.

We are hoping that coincidentally with Winsome, we have designed a product which engages the interests of both genders – it involves some novel and intriguing engineering AND can take you to novel and intriguing places!