Green & Silver

by L.T.C. Rolt, Angela Rolt (Photographer)

L. T .C . Rolt (1910 - 1974), writer and engineer, was one of the first people in modern Britain to draw attention to the value of our canals as a means of transport and a source of pleasure. Britain's network of canals, so important to commerce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had been neglected and almost forgotten by the 1940s, and was in danger of total extinction. Tom Rolt, along with a group of enthusiasts inspired by his seminal book of 1944, Narrow Boat, founded the Inland Waterways Association in 1946 to restore and revitalise Britain’s canals.

The journey Tom Rolt and his wife Angela embarked on in 1946 is less well known. They travelled through the waterways of southern Ireland, documenting their voyage in this book, first published in 1949.

Their voyage takes them over the broad Shannon, and down Lough Derg, across the great Bog of Allen to the docks of Dublin, returning to the Shannon via the lonely Grand Canal.

Angela Rolt took the photographs at the time, especially for the book.

Only the third UK edition since 1949, Green & Silver paints a wonderful and evocative picture of the Irish waterways as they were just after the end of the Second World War.

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 1949

About the author

Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt (usually abbreviated to Tom Rolt or L.T.C. Rolt) was a prolific English writer and the biographer of major civil engineering figures including Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain's inland waterways, and as an enthusiast for both vintage cars and heritage railways.