If you’re not one for messing around in boats or barges, perhaps you’d fancy keeping your feet on dry land and becoming a full-time gongoozler instead? For those not in the know, a gongoozler is somebody who hangs around canals, ogling boats and watching life pass by on the narrow waterways.

Gongoozlers manage to maintain a dual state of inertia and entrancement, specifically on the banks, bridges or locks of canals. In the past, a gongoozler was someone who hung around bridges to laugh at the inept efforts of less experienced barge folk as they struggled to pass through locks.

Barge communities and clubs have these days adopted the term — in an ironic sense — to describe themselves. The word “gongoozling” originated in Lancashire, birthplace of Britain’s canals, from the local slang of “gawning” and “goozling”: staring and watching with the mouth agape, respectively.

Over the past decade, the number of gongoozlers in Ireland has been steadily increasing, along with the revitalisation of the country’s main canals, the Royal and the Grand (both connecting Dublin with the Shannon River), and the segmented Barrow water system. In two years’ time, when a new entrance to the sea is opened at Spencer Dock in Dublin, it will be possible to travel by barge all the way from the Irish Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

Canals, once the domain of barges taking Guinness out of Dublin and turf back into it, have seen volumes of traffic quadruple in 15 years. Canal cruising has now become a popular holiday.

But while the waterways themselves have been revitalised and lock-keepers are in demand once more, the lot of many keepers’ cottages has not improved.

Over the years, successive governments have failed to maintain these canalside cottages, and many have become run-down.

Although there were originally up to 100 lock houses on Irish canals, the number is much lower now.

“Once an old lock keeper died or moved out, the new ones rarely moved in, so many places are now in a very poor state of repair,” says a spokesman for Waterways Ireland, the body charged with running canals north and south of the border.

Many lock houses are dilapidated because of their unusual configuration and their proximity to what may, until quite recently, have been dead or dangerous water.

Alan Lindley, an eighth-generation lock keeper working on the Grand Canal, has been dealing with gongoozlers and boatmen for more than 20 years. His first canal-focused ancestor worked as a foreman on the construction of the Grand in the 1790s. Lindley, who is currently stationed at the 30th lock on the canal, is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“I do get a few weeks’ holidays in the year, though,” he says.

He was brought up in a lock keeper’s house and still lives in one. “They were mostly constructed before the canals actually opened, so most are more than 200 years old and nearly all have been built in a very particular style,” he says.

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