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.

A Whale of a Time

After half a century plus of living in Bristol (give or take a few years of exile in the middle), it's always a bit of a thrill to find somewhere new to visit, especially when it's a nature reserve right in the middle of the city.  So off it was to one of the most affluent parts of the city, Snide Park.

OK, so it's Sneyd Park really. Snide Park is what we used to call it when we were kids, living on the wrong side of the B4054 Henleaze Road. The name has stuck - and so have I.

Look, you can tell it's dead posh by its oak-framed information board.  

The moment you leave gracious suburbia, you're in Bishops Knoll, once part of a mediaeval deer park and later, in the 19th century, the gardens of a (now demolished) mansion, complete with terraces, an arboretum, orchards, lawns and paddocks.  We stuck to the footpath through woodlands to get down to Bennett's Patch and White's Paddock, alongside the River Avon, being inspected all the way down by a persistent Southern Hawker. 

Being next to the river means it's also alongside the Portway, one of the busiest and fastest roads in the city, and the Severn Beach line - between the two, in fact, and very noisy. But I have a handy trick for dealing with that, which is to pretend the traffic is the ice-age torrent that originally carved the Gorge. That way it doesn't impinge after a while. 

Our reason for coming here was to see the whales in their new home. Well - not real ones, obviously; rather, the wicker ones designed by Cod Steaks, which graced Bristol during the city's stint as European Green Capital (back in the halycon days before our ex-Prime Minister asked a stupid question and got a very stupid answer). 

Here they are in their sea of plastic bottles in Millennium Square, exactly a year ago.

And now they are surfacing in the city's newest nature reserve. 

It's an appropriate place for them to find a home because in 1750, the ship Adventure brought back two whales, which were rendered to blubber just up the road at Sea Mills Dock. The venture into the whaling trade continued for almost 50 years.

They remind me quite a lot of the beached barges at Purton near Sharpness, which we went to see just over three years ago.

Instead of going back over the railway bridge, we walked down to the tunnel that goes under the track. 

Being a geek, I was excited to spot a brick from the old Cattybrook Brickworks near Almondsbury - one of those names I hope to fit into a poem one day. 

Then one last glimpse of the whales through the trees and home. 

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.