My parents had rented a barge to explore the Barrow Navigation in Ireland for a week. I joined them on three days to capture water-level imagery with my GoPro (and to catch up with them as well). There are unfortunately 1.7km missing where the battery of the camera ran out, and there was no place to moore to exchange or charge it.

All the images are uploaded to Mapillary (Sequence key for 1st sequence: l2Yx6tGPdI9qRUAwZLvTFe) and Panoramax (Sequence key for 1st sequence: 7fe2a04f-e18c-4cf3-8bb5-48af1d1cf7ad); there were 2,446 in total, if I remember correctly. This being Ireland, of course it rained for some bits of it, so the images between Carlow and Athy are a bit blurry.

Along the way, I tried to improve the waterway mapping, especially mooring places and water supply. Mooring places don’t seem to get rendered at all (not even in the waterways map on OSMAnd), so that was a bit of a waste of time from my perspective. I’m hoping that there is an app out there that does render them.

One lock South of Goresbridge is no longer in use which means that they had to turn around in Goresbridge, even though the Barrow Navigation continues for 12 more locks or so. It’s probably fine in a kayak that you can lift out and carry around the broken/ silted up lock. Another lock was broken as well, but the lock keeper was able to fix it for them within an hour.

I also tried to map the actual route that boats are allowed to take, because when you have several arches in a bridge, there is usually only one dedicated arch the boat is supposed to take, but I have not found a documented way of mapping that. So I used a line in a route relation, but there aren’t even waterway routes as far as I could find. Water supply was also someone important, not just for drinking water supply, but because they needed to refill their tank for washing the dishes and taking showers. Half of the water taps didn’t seem to work, and some were only for drinking water, and you couldn’t connect your boat’s hose to it. I haven’t found out whether there is a way to map the hose connecting option. Come to think of it, when they had to carry 5l bottles in between the tap and the boat, because there was no hose connector, it would have been nice to be able to either hang the bottle/ bucket like you could on the old village pumps or have a little plinth underneath. But that’s not really a mapping issue, that’s a badly executed amenities issue.

I had mapped the Barrow Navigation from satellite imagery, created Wikidata (Barrow Navigation Q134700972) entries for all the locks etc last year in preparation of their visit, so uploading photographs (Barrow Navigation on Wikimedia) of all the locks and most of the bridges was convenient enough. I had even made a video on how to map mooring points at the time: on Youtube.

This all sounds a bit negative, but it was actually fun to see the Navigation from that perspective. I had walked parts of the Barrow Way trail which runs parallel two years previous (I think), so some of the amenities etc along the bank were fairly well mapped.

Discoveries along the way

I spotted two more milestones in addition to the ones I had spotted walking the Barrow Way, both along where I had already walked.

I also found out about a newish European Hiking trail called The Columban Way (Via Columbani) which connects Ireland with Italy (with a few countries in between). I’ve created a hiking relation; it would be marvelous, if other people could add to it.

Not mapable discoveries include a great number of swans (incl. 5 cygnets), an otter, a heron eating an eel, a kingfisher and lots and lots of plastic bottles swimming in the canal.

(The images are all on Wikimedia.)