Purton Hulks in Winter Mud

The last time I went to Purton, it was at a very different time of year: high summer and so hot that an escape from Bristol was imperative, and the next day at work that one evening spent twenty miles upstream felt, in retrospect, as if I'd been on a week's holiday.

This time it wasn't just that it was getting dark at two-thirty in the afternoon; it felt as if the day hadn't got light at all.

Just a rim on the horizon.

Up on the bank beyond the canal, the abandoned hulks that form the bulwark between it and the Severn were diving not into the waving grass of summer with its foamy seeds, but mud.

It was all very dreichy.

The tide was racing in and had already covered the wrecks of the tankers Arkendale and Wastdale, which struck and destroyed the Severn Railway Bridge one foggy night in 1960, with tragic consequences. 

A good reason for Son the Younger, whose first visit it was, to come back another day.

We squelched our way downstream.

I'd forgotten to change my shoes for walking boots before I'd left Bristol, and didn't fancy negotiating the mud in the dark anyway, so we were careful not to overstay. 

I'd like to come back again on a bright winter's morning in frost.

The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and Purton Hulks

It was hot in Bristol last night, so rather than lie on the settee and sweat, I decided to seek out a bit of a breeze.  The River Severn seemed like a safe bet.  

We parked by the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal at the village of Purton to the north of Sharpness and watched a storm of swallows swoop for flies under the bridge.  A couple of swans swanned about, ducks duckled and it was all very idyllic.  

At its beginning the canal runs very close to the River Severn, and in 1909 it was noticed that a new channel was developing near the shore which threatened the integrity of the canal bank, so during the next half century a number of barges and trows were hulked to form a tidal erosion barrier.

Each boat was taken out of Sharpness Dock on a high spring tide, towed towards the shore and left to ride up the bank as far as possible.  Then holes were knocked in the hulls so that they would fill with silt.  

In this boat's graveyard there's also a schooner 'Katherine Ellen' which was impounded in 1921 for running guns to the IRA and several Ferrous Concrete Barges built in World War II.  
 

Over the years the ground level has built up, and many of the hulks are now submerged in long grass.  

Here wood is stripped and repainted with lichen and great rusted nails stick out at angles.

One barge, its rudder like a whale's fluke, sails below the surface.

Out beyond the shore, other wrecks lie visible at low tide. 

By now the sun was setting so we turned back towards the canal.  

The moon was floating among the grasses and weeds.  It was definitely time to go to the pub ...

... where Ted came between a man and his drink.