A towpath is the narrow path that runs along the bank of a canal or river. It is there for a reason that has almost disappeared: before engines, boats full of coal and grain were pulled along canals by horses walking on the bank, and the towpath is the strip of ground the horses walked on. The rope ran from the horse's harness out to the boat. That is the whole word, and the whole history, in one flat little path. The horses are long gone, but the paths were never dug up — and now they are one of the nicest things in Britain. People walk their dogs on them, cycle to work along them, run on them, fish from them. Because a canal has to stay level, a towpath is always flat, which is exactly why cyclists love them. In cities like Birmingham and London you can cross half the city on a towpath and barely see a car. So the word has two layers at once: the old working meaning (the horse path) and the living modern one (the walking and cycling route). When a British person says 'we walked back along the towpath', they mean today, they mean pleasure, and they are not thinking about horses at all. It is a British word above all. Canals in that dense network are a British thing, and so is the vocabulary around them: towpath, lock, narrowboat, barge.

縴道、拖船道（運河或河岸邊的小路，早年是馬匹拉船走的路，現在多當散步、騎車道）