Rowing Boats

A Memory of Barnstaple.

It must have been in the early 1950s when an Aunt and Uncle, actually cousins of my mother's from Bolton, came to visit on holiday. In those days I remember there were rowing boats for hire from the boathouse moored near the entrance to Rock Park and the South Walk which can be seen in the 1899 photo. That means it must have been there for a good while before the relatives took me out in one of the boats and rowed up the river as far as the iron railway bridge which had been built to ling the Great Western Station at Victoria Road with the Southern Railway at Barnstaple Junction. The abiding memory is of us grounding on a sandbank but fortunately not getting stuck. I remember being frightened that we would sink but nearly sixty years later I am still around to tell the tale!