Islay's meadow

The firm retired its last towing horse in 1958. It has rented the same meadow ever since and sends hay every month. People ask why a carrying company pays rent on an empty field. Here is the answer I give at the wharf.

Islay was the last horse. She worked the flight for nineteen years and retired to a meadow two fields from the canal, close enough to hear Lock 14's paddles if the wind was right, which the yard swore she noticed. When she died in 1971 the firm did not end the tenancy. It just kept paying, and when the meadow's owner asked what for, the second Islay - the firm does not discuss how many horses have held the name - moved in the following spring.

The hay arrives monthly and the invoice line has never changed: to Islay, per tradition. The accountants of four generations have proposed ending it. Every one of them retired or moved on, and the line outlived each administration, which tells you something about how traditions actually survive: not by decision, but by being more trouble to remove than to keep.

The horses matter to the firm's memory more than any boat does. Boats are replaced and repainted. The meadow is the one place where the work that made the company still has an address. On festival weekends the current Islay is walked down to the towpath and the Nell & Ivy pair runs the way it did in 1902, and the whole wharf turns out to watch, including, in order of enthusiasm, the gongoozlers, the crew, and the tea urn queue.

So: rent on an empty field. It is not empty. It holds the firm's first engine.

Alden Marlow-Hesketh walks the hay over himself in December. The meadow is fictional. The sentiment, we hope, travels.

One more thing, because it gets asked at the wharf every single time the story is told. No, the firm did not keep the meadow as a tax matter, a heritage matter, or a publicity matter. It kept it because Isaac's son, asked at the 1958 annual lunch what he intended to do about Islay, said: "the same as the rest of us, retire to a field and be fed." Nobody laughed harder than Isaac's son. The hay has arrived monthly ever since, and the invoice line has outlived every argument against it, which is as good a definition of a tradition as the firm has ever produced.