Meet Mandi & Dave at Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

People come to our new café boat from all across the world and from around the corner! We've only just launched our business on the canal by the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales and it's definitely looking like it's a success so far! This stretch of the Llangollen Canal is a World Heritage Site so we're in a prime spot for customers for the café boat - visitors come for a day out at the canal and there's always time for a cup of tea and a slice of lemon cake or Victoria Sponge!

We make all our own food from fresh ingredients and our homemade cakes are a real sell-out! To be honest we once we had to buy a cake in, so we felt we had to put a sign on it saying it wasn't homemade - but once people saw the sign, they didn't want it!

We traded in Lymm for three years before we launched here in Trevor Basin. Business was a bit slow there and Dave had been considering going back to his old job. He'd been an engineer in the same place for 36 years and he just really didn't want to go back to that. I saw an advert in Towpath Trader to tender for this site and I said to him do you fancy going and working up at the aqueduct - and that was it!

It's a beautiful spot here, it's so tranquil, it really is. It's very hard work, and we don't expect it to make us super-rich, but we've got the right location, and the canals are getting more attractive because of how they are being looked after, so that's all good for our business. It's going so well we're hoping we'll be employing extra hands soon!

Mandi & Dave, Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Trevor Basin, Llangollen Canal