Barging in Champagne

The final week of our European trip was spent on a hotel barge on a canal parallel to the Marne River in the Champagne area of France. The Merganser II was built in the 1930s. Its purpose originally would have been carrying freight. There are 5000 miles of navigable waterways in France. At one time canals and rivers were the highways of the country, today most of them are used for pleasure.
The Merganser was restored by Robin Purdue, an Englishman with a love of barges. It holds a maximum of eight passengers and crew of three although on our trip we were only four. We enjoyed chugging along the canals, going through dozens of locks and spending part of each day and night moored near a village or town. We didn’t bicycle along the towpath as we could have but we did walk from lock to lock when they were close together.

We were struck by the architecture of the region. In many of the villages and towns there were very old houses in the style that we thought of as Tudor. In France it is called architecture rurale champenoise. The rural architecture of Champagne. We had seen similar architecture in northern German villages as well as Strasbourg. In Medieval times houses and buildings of ordinary people were typically timber framed. The frame was usually filled with wattle and daub but occasionally with brick.