Though I will agree with James Henry about how the voting for the [Canal & River Trust] Council has been run, surely his example of 360,000,000 visitors a year to the canals cannot be correct, writes Gillian Moore.
This means that there have to be over 986,300 people a day visiting the canals (I gather this includes the rivers). Taking this further, diving by the number of miles of canals and rivers, this equates to 493 visitors to every mile of canal and river every day.
Never saw a soul
Having very slowly taken our time coming up from Kidderminster though various places including around Wolverhampton and Stafford over the past fortnight to Hayward Junction, we were lucky to see around 20 a day, mostly dog walkers, many of whom I saw twice. In fact a couple of days I never saw a soul.
It is now well into December, cold, and about to rain, and I can bet my life I shall not see those 493 visitors today! And as January approaches, it gets colder and perhaps we get snow, I can assure your correspondent that there will not be 986,300 visitors a day anywhere on the [navigable] canals or rivers, in fact they will be lucky, with the exception of dog walkers, if they get any!
Your correspondent has it wrong.