The towpath mile

Behind Main Street, one block to the east, runs the Delaware Canal: sixty miles of still water and towpath paralleling the river from Bristol to Easton. Readers who like their walking measured in stages can compare this mile with a German trail journal covering the Lieserpfad, kept stage by stage in the same spirit. New Hope sits at Lock 11, and the canal is the town's second street: quieter, older in its way, and walked by more locals than tourists on most mornings. The towpath mile through town is the flattest, easiest walk in the book and the one the bookor uses to think.

What the canal was

The canal opened in the 1830s to carry coal, lumber and goods along the river corridor without trusting the river's moods. Mules walked the towpath pulling the boats; Lock 11 in New Hope raised and lowered them past the fall in the ground. The canal outlived its commercial era, survived a campaign to fill it, and became Delaware Canal State Park. The towpath is now a public trail for its whole length, which means a walker in New Hope can step onto a path that runs, unbroken, for the length of the county.

At Lock 11 the lock chamber still holds water, the locktender's house still stands beside it, and the mule-drawn boat ride that leaves from nearby is the canal's own entry in this book. The lock is where the town's two stories (the industrial canal and the tourist town) overlap visibly.

The mile itself

Walk north from Lock 11 and the path passes the back of the town: garden fences, the rear walls of Main Street buildings, a footbridge or two, then open canal with the river never far beyond the far bank's trees. Walk south and the path passes the playhouse mill and continues toward Washington Crossing. Either direction is flat, shaded and nearly empty on a weekday.

The surface is packed earth and gravel. After heavy rain it softens and the canal rises; after floods the state park closes sections, and their own boards carry the moving detail closures. The path is shared with cyclists, who are polite but faster than the scenery suggests.

The cartographer's note

Every river town has two fronts: the one that faces the road and the one that faces the water. New Hope's canal side is its back porch, and the towpath mile is the cheapest seat on it. Walk it once at first light and the town's whole plan makes sense: ferry landing below, canal behind, Main Street in between, everything within a mile of everything.

Beyond the mile

The towpath's real promise is that it does not end at the town line. North, the path runs upriver through the canal towns toward Lumberville and beyond, past locks and locktender houses in decreasing order of company. South, it runs toward Washington Crossing through stretches of open canal where the town's noise drops away within minutes. Ambitious walkers and cyclists treat the town as a trailhead, and they are right to: the book's mile is only the marked center of a path that carries the whole valley's length, and the lots of this book are only the busiest link in it.

The book repeats its standing caution on every lot: hours, menus, schedules and rates move faster than any printed sheet, and what is written here was true when the lot was walked. The entry's number never changes, the distance mark never changes, and the character of the place rarely does; but the details that close a day (the opening hour, the seasonal deck, the last tour) belong to the people who run them, and their own boards and pages are the final word.