Whale Watching on the River Severn

By late morning, the fog had burnt off and it was a beautiful day, so I wrangled the dog into the car and set off for Aust in the hopes of visiting the church there. 

Many churches on the flood plain of the River Severn/Bristol channel are built on what were once islands of higher ground, jutting out of marshland. The Ancient Chapelry of St John is one.  

When I saw the iron gates, my heart sank but they weren't locked, hooray! 

The church door, however, wouldn't budge and there was no notice indicating where a key might be held.

So we haunted the churchyard for a bit.

There was a gravestone which appeared to have been inscribed in moss. Maybe not quite as precisely as the one I saw at Tetbury some years ago, but intriguing all the same.

Feeling disconsolate, we decided to have a bit of wander and headed for Oldbury-on-Severn.

Another commanding church - St Arilda's - on its man-made tump atop a hill. But we weren't visiting it today.

Instead we walked out to the mouth of Oldbury Pill ... 

... and headed south-west along the top of the sheep-trodden flood defences ...

... towards the old Severn Bridge, all misty in the distance. 

Pillhead Gout

Our destination was Whale Wharf, at the point where Littleton Pill flows into the Severn and Cowhill Warth - this beautiful stretch of saltmarsh that is twice daily covered by the tide - becomes Littleton Warth. 

Whale Wharf is so called because, as Oldbury fisherman Hector Knapp wrote in January 1885, 'thear was a Whal cum ashore at Littleton Pill and bid thear a fortnight. He was sixty eaight feet long. His mouth was twelve feet.  

The queen claim it at last, and sould it for forty pound. Thear supposed to be forty thousen pepeal to se it from all parts of the country and from far and near'.   

I was going to have to make do with pretending that the substantial pieces of driftwood deposited along the high tideline were the skeletal remains of aquatic monsters. There'd be no whales today.

Or so I thought ... 

Can't make it out? It's the Airbus Beluga (A300-600 Super Transporter) en route from Toulouse to Hawarden in Flintshire, and fresh from a fly-past at my hometown of Filton, where its wings are made. 









  
Yeah, I know, crap photos. But if you look very closely, you can see some pissed off oystercatchers, flying about and meeping like mad.


  

Cowhill Rhine

Littleton Pill 

Excitement over and time to turn back. Now, instead of the Severn Bridges, we had the decommissioned Oldbury Nuclear Power Station in our sights. 

Proving a magnificent distraction all the way back were a pair of little egrets, who were acutely aware of Ted's and my presence, flying off whenever we got anywhere close enough to get a half decent photo. 

I was reminded of this lovely poem and painting by Dru Marland. 

No idea who owned these feathers. An owl, maybe? (There are short-eared owls below the old Severn bridge at Aust.) Anyhow, they have beautiful leaf shapes.

NOTE: They are curlew feathers

Back at Oldbury Pill ...

... and finally reaching the car, parked in the village.




 

St Arilda's bluebells and cowslips

It being my mother's birthday yesterday I turned down the opportunity of a jaunt to Wells in the now fully functioning Moggy with Dru Marland and John Terry, instead partaking of a carvery with my parents and my aunt in a pub on the A38 just outside Thornbury.  As I was fetching them their 'bottomless Cornish ice-cream' (sub Mr Whippy in a small glass sundae dish, self-served from a machine that oozed it out in a way that reminded me of my dog's rear end), I decided to wrest the remains of the afternoon from the jaws of defeat and take them somewhere worth going, namely, St Arilda's at Oldbury-on-Severn, which is perched high on an ancient man-made tump overlooking the flood plain of the River Severn. 

Possibly not the most tactful of places to take a captive audience whose combined age is 252, but none of them had ever been there before.  But the views are splendid.

This being later than last year's visit, the daffodils were mostly over, but there were bluebells, cowslips, dandelions, primroses, herb robert and starry stitchwort, not to mention hedgerows crammed with blackthorn. 

Here's my mother at 84, still blazing a trail. 

  

And yes, she still has enough puff to blow out all the candles in one go. 

St Arilda's daffodils

Having spent many years studying the plain walls of Methodist churches,  it was a little disappointing to discover that Oldbury-on-Severn Parish Church is in much the same mould – plain walls, minimal stained glass, pitch pine 

pews, and a memorial to the fallen of the Great War.  Only the painted organ pipes hint at allegiance to a more decorative tradition.  


Turns out it was rebuilt in 1897 following a disastrous fire which left only the north porch and tower of the original church standing.  The exterior of the new building is pleasing, however, being very much in the Arts and Crafts tradition with massive buttresses bolstering its position on top of the man-made tump which is possibly a burial mound. 

Certainly, the circular churchyard indicates that this is pre-Christian holy site.  It’s also believed to be the eventual burying place of the bones of a local Saxon saint, Arilda, who, according to Leland, was 'martired at Kineton ny Thornberye by one Muncius a tiraunt, who cut off hir heade becawse she would not consent to lye with him'.  The church is dedicated to her.

In the surviving ancient porch there is a scattering of faint Crusader crosses.  

Far harder to miss is the view over table top tombs and the Severn flood plain to the old bridge.  And the local nuclear power plant. 

            

And the lovely, starry daffodils blooming all over the tump. As is their wont.