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.

A Jaunt to Sharpness and bark-bark-Berkeley

Ach du lieber Gott, I am way behind with my bloggerei about my jaunterei.  Must rectifei.

It’s almost three weeks since I asked Ted where he wanted to go for our first proper walk of 2011.  He said ‘Sharpness and bark-bark-Berkeley’, so that’s where we went.  It suited me, anyhow – an easy, six-mile stroll on the Severn flood plain to test my ribs and hip and find out how they were mending. 

Having passed the museum to Edward Jenner, local pioneer of the smallpox vaccine, our first stop was Berkeley’s Church of St Mary the Virgin, which has a very odd-looking exterior as its tower is situated the opposite side of the churchyard from the rest of the building, this having been done for strategic reasons, apparently. 

I am a bit of a late convert when it comes to Berkeley Castle, having spent a good 40 years assiduously avoiding the place, after visiting at an impressionable age and being terrified by stories of a jester falling from the balcony to his death and the gruesome fate of people imprisoned in the dungeon at the bottom of a 36-foot deep shaft in the incongruously well-appointed King’s Gallery.  (I’m relieved that no one took it upon themselves to reveal to my five-year-old self how the hapless Edward II allegedly met his end.) I love it now, although in mid-March it was still closed for winter and Ted and I only saw it from adjacent fields. 

The church itself is exceptional, its most striking feature being the survival of such a lot of its mediaeval paintwork. 

I especially liked this corbel of two female heads surmounted by a toad, a sermon in stone to reinforce the message that gossip is poisonous …  

  

… and this Tudor rose, believed to relate to Edward VI. 

Here, the intricately carved tomb of Thomas Berkeley, the 5th Baron, and his wife Katherine.

After leaving the church, we wandered along Berkeley Pill towards the estuary.  It was a bright day and the sun had real warmth in it, so after we had negotiated a field of cows the size of caravans, I sat down in a patch of teasels and composed an ode to my faithful and fearless(!) canine companion. 

There was loads of mistletoe in the trees.  Why do we only put it up at Christmas?  The world would be a better place with more snogging.

Eventually we reached the Severn, with sunny views up to the dock at Sharpness, and a gloomier vista downstream towards Berkeley nuclear power station, with Oldbury in the distance.  The post-earthquake problems at Fukushima might be half a world away, but there was a catastrophic tsunami in this estuary in 1607.  The next one promises to be far worse, thanks to our idiocy.

   

The return leg of our walk took us inland from Sharpness to Berkeley.  As is so often the case, the very last section, just prior to getting back to the car, involved negotiating the muddiest lane of the day.  I was rather more careful, and thus considerably less besmirched, than Ted, who needed a stern rubbing down with the old towel I keep in the boot for just such eventualities. 

All in all, though, my ribs and hips held up pretty well and it was a good opening to our jaunting season.  Looking forward to many more forays over the year.