A Taste of Lancashire

Periwinkle is a 60’ narrowboat, built to our specification at Lower Park Marina on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. She was designed by us as a hotel boat and for the past 14 summers we have cruised almost the whole system with our guests sharing our love and knowledge of the waterways. We thoroughly enjoyed these years and met some lovely people, many of whom we now consider friends. Due to various personal reasons we decided that 2015 would be our final season.

It was our true love of the waterways that led us to hotel boating in the first place, and we still wanted to cruise the system, living and working from Periwinkle.

We considered that operating as roving traders would allow us to do this.

As I am sure most people know one of the main features of a hotel boat is the excellent food that is produced for the guests. We always finished the evening meal with a great cheese board, only cheese from the UK was presented, we do have some wonderful regional cheeses in this country. One thing we soon discovered was that really good Lancashire cheese was difficult to find the further south we travelled.

We are both Lancastrians and proud of the fact, also the area of Lancashire that we are from, Chipping in the Forest of Bowland has several really good local family run cheese makers within a 10-mile radius.

We decided that we would sell Lancashire cheeses, the traditional Crumbly, Creamy and Tasty, also Goats cheese, Sykes Fell sheep’s cheese, and for a change smoked Lancashire or Lancashire with black pepper, these are all from Greenfields award winning cheese makers. We also have Garstang Blue, a creamy blue cheese from Dewlay of Garstang. We then decided to stock other Lancashire products from mainly artisan producers. We sell amongst other things, Chutneys and relishes from Fatjax, Chutneys and jams from Reedy’s Naturally, crisps from Fiddlers (they grow the potatoes and produce the crisps on their farm in West Lancashire).

As I have said we are proud Lancastrians, we feel passionate about the items we sell and we love the waterways, this is our first year as roving traders and we are learning as we travel. We have already met a few other traders and are really looking forward to meeting more and hopefully continuing to travel and sell our wares as we do so.