Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, labelling the river Severn as melancholic. That’s largely projection on my part. You can see from the thickness of the sea-wall that it deserves a lot of respect. The speed, force and sheer height of the tides makes the Severn a dangerous river to navigate. The second biggest rise and fall in the world gives it not just the appearance of power but also the sound of it. The unmistakable song of water on the move; riffling the banks as a farmer might roll a full head of grain between thumb and finger to feel the measure of the harvest; investigating the cornice of field edge here, a length of stock fence or a fallen tree. A fast flowing river is hungry.
But the Severn is also a tidal river as far as Gloucester. It breathes: rises and falls; rises and falls; breathing inwards and outwards twice a day every 12 hours and 25 minutes – constantly moving against the times of sunrise and sunset because the tide belongs to the moon, which is why the Severn is female and has been so since Celtic and Roman times. The tide flushes its banks for 25 miles as a river and a further 15 miles if you include the estuary where it meets the Bristol channel. But the Moon is in a constant elliptical orbit around the earth and so the highest and lowest tides – the springs and neaps – which cover a tidal range of between 12 and 15 metres, forty to fifty feet of variation at Avonmouth, occur according to the gravitational pull around full and new moon. At these times the funnelling of upstream tide on the river, particularly around Arlingham, meeting the downstream flow from beyond Gloucester, causes a surge wave known as the Severn Bore, twice a day for about 130 days every year. The biggest surges gather abundant spectators and surfers as the wave moves upstream. But there’s even more. On January 30th 1604 a tsunami wave over 25 feet high and travelling at 30mph barrelled up the Severn inundating villages and killing thousands of people. The churches at Littleton on Severn and Oldbury on Severn are built on raised ground and may have escaped the worst. In 2001 during the Foot and Mouth crisis I stood in Oldbury churchyard and witnessed the sight and smell of thousands of cattle being burned in giant pyres. So yes, I think some element of mournful is justified.
On the other hand, the Severn can be a great solace. Just as I would go fishing, if time was short I could always drive down to Shepperdine and walk up the path towards Oldbury. At dusk it is at its most mysterious as the lights come on across the river and the navigation lights indicate the safe passage for boats. Occasionally a skein of geese will fly overhead and once I was near the old Windbound when a hare careered up the field alongside and flew across the fence within feet of me.
The place I choose to call Severnside is a variable strip of land to the west of the A38 and the motorway. When we first moved to the area I was convinced that the locals were rotating road signs to keep people out. It has more in common with fen or wetland than anything else. Fields are small, drained by rhynes (pronounced reens) and small scale farming is the only show in town. It was once – and still is – a good place to grow apples, especially cider apples because the mass of water nearby acts like a gigantic night storage heater. Frosts visit the orchards less frequently than in the rest of Gloucestershire. Sheep still graze in the orchards. When I wanted some real peace I would cycle down there and drink in the isolated atmosphere. It’s easy to get lost in the multiple lanes and tracks but easier to lose yourself and your troubles.
The job was relentless, and I was the recipient of many confidences, not all of them good or comforting. People would share their troubles but they would also share their stories; stories that connected them and me back in history. Every pastoral visit, every wedding, baptism or particularly funeral would yield a rich harvest of stories which I rarely wrote down; but as time went on I became increasingly aware that without ever volunteering for the job I was becoming the Story-Keeper. As I grew close to retirement after 25 years, that sense of responsibility weighed on me more and more as the population changed from a largely farming, fishing and quarrying community to a commuting village which exploded in size to accommodate workers in the two (now decommissioned) nuclear power stations at Oldbury and Berkeley. A trajectory that was accelerating and which would never change. For ten years after retiring I felt constrained to keep quiet, but by now most of the old folks are dead and even the incomers who were’t averse to a bit of bullying and harrying have mostly passed on. The congregations in the churches I cared for were (largely) wonderful; the diocese did nothing but increase the workload. The river was my escape and consolation; it was big; vast and utterly indifferent to my troubles, successes and failures. I started to photograph the plants – never quite sure what they were called – the abandoned barges and the machinery that accompanied the drainage channels; the orchards and cider houses. It was my escape. The birds, the wind, the sound of the water, the larger ships entering and leaving the canal at Sharpness. It was OK to be a lost soul there, and so I’ve started to reunite some of those photographic memories with words. Even melancholy has its joys.
