STAYCATIONS are growing in popularity, with this year seeing a rise in the number of people choosing to holiday on their home turf. And I'm all for that.

After all, we live in a truly glorious country and, this year at least, we are enjoying the perfect staycation weather. Not surprisingly, the Lake District is at the top of many people's list of places when it comes to domestic destinations for their holidays; but for those of us who already live in Cumbria, summer is the time to leave the Lakes to the tourist throngs.

Which is why I headed slightly further south for my own summer holidays - to Cheshire. Not the most obvious of destinations for a staycation, admittedly, but Cheshire is blessed with one thing that Cumbria sorely lacks: canals. (Yes, I know there's Ulverston Canal but it hardly counts.)

And not just any old canals but the Cheshire Ring system, 90-plus miles (and 90-plus locks) of navigable inland waterways. Along with my sister and brother-in-law, my husband and I hired a 68-foot narrowboat and set off on our waterborne adventure, announcing excitedly to the receptionist at the marina, "we've come to do the Cheshire Ring." "You can't - it's shut," replied the receptionist, deadpan - but also deadly serious.

Thanks in no small part to some canalside vandalism, the Cheshire Ring can't be completed, a chunk of it being shut for the foreseeable, while a £2m-plus repair operation is carried out, following the allegedly deliberate flooding of a flight of locks.

Wondering despairingly at the mindset of anyone who could derive pleasure from such damage, we embarked upon plan B: a week-long, walking pace voyage along the Trent and Mersey Canal, pottering along, mooring at canalside pubs for leisurely lunches, marvelling at the wonderful wildlife (kingfishers being our favourite sights - along with clutches of tiny ducklings swimming with their mothers), and seeing the world from a wholly different perspective.

There's something utterly magical about a canal holiday. No airports, no crowds, no hustle and bustle - just peace and quiet (apart from when you go under the M6), time to think, and plenty of fresh air and exercise in the shape of guiding one's vessel through the locks - at which I am pretty nifty, if I do say so myself.

I proved less nifty at guiding our vessel through a 1.5-mile pitch-black tunnel at Harecastle near Stoke-on-Trent, sadly, crashing into Thomas Telford's masterpiece more times than I care to remember. Great fun, though.

Our inland waterways system, shaped by the industrial revolution, is one of the great domestic man-made wonders, a testament to some remarkable feats of civil engineering, ingenuity and sheer hard graft.

With their raison d'etre destroyed by the advent of trains and automobiles, the inland waterways of Britain had to reinvent themselves or die. Thanks to the leisure industry, that reinvention has been a success - for which staycationers such as myself are immensely grateful.