Tag: River Severn

Melancholy River IV. Cider

A quintessential autumn shot of the allotment site

I don’t know why I find this photo so arresting – so emotionally and metaphorically rich. I took it some time ago on the allotment site when the bathing of the tree in strong autumn sunlight reminded me irresistibly of a Samuel Palmer painting. That’s a clue to its power, I suppose.

To a horticulturalist it’s Malus domestica and the specific name “domestica” anchors its cultural existence within the household. The genus “Malus” derives originally from the Greek for melon and the Latin was eagerly pounced on by later Christian theologians who, when translating the Bible from the Latin (which in turn was translated from the Greek via the Hebrew) needed to find a name for the fruit that Adam and Eve frolicked over in the Garden of Eden; so “Malus” and “mal” (evil) were forever roped together in religious terms as apple, and Eve allegedly led to all our woes by whipping off Adam’s fig leaf and seeing the first recorded Cox’s Orange Pippin. Any further explanation of what happened next is unnecessary; except that’s not what the fourth-hand translation actually said. Much misquoted but rarely actually read the alleged crime was not eating the fruit but of eating from the tree whose fruit was the knowledge of good and evil. That’s to say it wasn’t really about a tree at all but an attempt by an ancient magisterium to impose a prohibition on freelance ethics.

Acquitted of its burden of guilt, the apple has thrived in gardens and orchards across the earth and divided into an enormous cousinery as diverse as the human race, not least around the areas bordering the River Severn with their apple friendly microclimate supported by the relative warmth of the river. Less frost equals more apples. But apples will only keep for a few months at best, and even with the assistance of cold storage bathed in inert gases and brought to ripeness for the supermarkets with a shot of acetylene they still taste nothing like a fresh apple picked warm from a tree. The best and longest life comes when they’re turned into cider. Severnside and the Bristol Channel areas of Somerset, Devon and the warmer climate of Cornwall are at the heart of cider making.

Severnside is a cider hotspot. If I can morph from gamekeeper to poacher, many a hedge still has a couple of large repurposed black fruit juice containers concealed within to avoid the attention of the Customs. I couldn’t possibly say how I know this obviously , but I speak as someone who can’t drink the cider because my stomach can no longer handle it. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that one of my teenage jobs was in a steel erecting company. We (they) made hoppers for the back end of cement lorries which were – if you look carefully – absolute marvels of rolling and welding. These guys were, may I say, bad. Later they moved into chemical engineering and power stations and ironically although I was banned from visiting nuclear power stations owing to my active CND membership I was able to work there as a junior gofer for a team of madmen. Some of them had worked on the first Severn Bridge and still bore the scars. One had a dent like the imprint of a tennis ball on his skull (falling bolt) and another had to drink half a bottle of rum before he climbed the steelwork because of his arthritis. The lasting legacy for me was my severe deafness and tinnitus caused by failing to wear ear protectors when sawing up RSJ’s. Back at the works we had 30 minutes for lunch and so we would sprint up to the pub, drink 3 pints of scrumpy and then sprint back to work to use dangerous heavy machinery. One day the landlord of the pub took me by the arm and led me behind the bar to show me something. The something was a hole right through the solid oak floor beneath the cider barrel we’d been drinking from. “You see that hole?” he said, that’s what it’s doing to your stomach – eating it!”. That was pretty much the end of my heavy drinking cider days although for years I would relish the occasional glass. Now I don’t drink at all.

Cider making is, if you’ve seen it being done, surprising. Cider apples have evolved not just for their juice but for their tannin which acts as a preservative in much the same way as hops do in beer. Cider apples are often very local, small, hard and completely inedible and yet they contain far more juice than you’d imagine possible. The extraction begins with chopping the apples in a machine called a scratter which can be a simple hand-cranked mill or something much bigger and powered like a wood chipper. We have visited a large (and very good) cider maker in Herefordshire several times over the years and last time we were there they were installing a huge continuous olive mill in which the olives/apples were chopped and pressed in a single non-stop operation. It was planned that the apples would be pressed in the same way. In large scale cider making the juice is treated with sulphite to kill the wild yeasts and then specialist yeasts are pitched into the juice. These yeasts can tolerate very high alcohol levels and so cider can be a deceptively dangerous drink for the unwary. I haven’t said much about the pear, but Perry, pear cider when well made is a beautiful drink which in its sparkling form can outdo any supermarket prosecco for depth of flavour, refinement and strength. A full sized pear tree is a sight to behold; tall and graceful and often going unrecognised in gardens and orchards. Our botanical neighbour Charlie told us how a vintage pear tree may have been cited as a way of stopping an unwanted supermarket car park up river from my old patch. He’s another enthusiast and we swap books and stories over our weekly meetings for coffee.

Recently there’s been a bit of a fashion for single variety ciders as the industry tried to go upmarket and away from its rather dangerous association with drunkenness (it was very cheap), and farm labourers for whom it frequently formed part of their wages. When Madame worked at a cider research station in the 70’s, a cider allowance was part of the wage for field workers on the payroll. Some large Severnside farms made thousands of gallon every year; most of it drunk on the farm. But as for single variety cider, it isn’t much more than a marketing ploy. I got to know one cider maker well while I was working on Severnside. He was universally known as “doughnut” – not because he was stupid but because on his first day at primary school in Oldbury on Severn his mum sent him with a white T shirt with a red band around the middle. And so Doughnut became his name for the rest of his life. He’d learned his craft from his father and dismissed the Kingston Black as a single source. He told me he always mixed varieties and always added a few sweet Cox apples. The truth is, when they were making such large quantities they were obliged to harvest from mixed orchards and I imagine that any additions to balance the batch were made on the basis of long experience. In the factory I mentioned above, the apples are brought in by lorry and unloaded into a washing pit before moving inside the building to be processed.

After scratting, traditionally the sloppy mash of chopped apples known as pomace or pomage would then be thickly layered between pieces of hessian sacking and made into cheeses; formed into a heap on the press and then pressed using human power using long poles inserted into the iron holes above the screw; or where it was possible, draught horses whose huge strength made the job much easier. Even on a small scale, the amount of apple juice that can be extracted from the rock hard apples is astonishing. Our friends in the Bannau Brycheiniog have an integrated hydraulic scratter and press which they run with apples from the many local varieties they’ve planted on their smallholding. The juice flows from the press and is gathered into buckets, poured into large wooden fermenting vessels and – traditionally – that was that. No special champagne yeasts were added but the natural yeasts on the apple skins were more than adequate to begin a vigorous, often noisy fermentation. We have a history of cider making in my family when my ancestors lived south of Bath. Two old aunts who my dad once visited made cider and after drinking too much of it he said he was driving home on his motorcycle when he realized he couldn’t feel his legs and so he drove into a hedge and lay there on the verge until he sobered up. He told me the fermenting cider made a sound like swarming bees.

And that takes me immediately to the darker side. Madame and I were at a party at the university one night when she was seized upon by a man who was a biochemist working on yeasts. It was an interesting conversation but not impressive as a chat-up line and he told her that if cider came on to the market today it would be banned because it contained so many dangerous compounds. In the end he became so boring she could only escape by pouring her drink over his shirt. However we often saw the dangers of rough cider – scrumpy -which, when drunk in excess would give its victims the shakes and ultimately kill them by damaging their livers. I’m sure that any toxins are well managed by large scale producers. One well known name in Hereford is locally famous because it was said that a real apple never passed through its gates, but only tanker loads of imported, necessarily pasteurised or sulphited juice arrived there. I once asked Doughnut why he like cider so much (by this time he’d lost his marriage, his job and his home and was living in a hostel); his answer “because it gets I pissed” says it all.

But on a local level, the old ways can still be found. There was a cider maker in a neighbouring village who would not sell cider on a Sunday; would not allow a woman anywhere near his shed, and who would always say “wanna wet” when I dropped by. A “wet” usually amounted to a couple of pints. His cider had few virtues except industrial strength; cloudy, sour and really only fit for cleaning silver. I had to stop going there.

In another of my parishes there was a thriving cider club who were keeping the tradition alive. They even managed to persuade the local pub to sell it under the name “Lifesaver”. I used to refer to it always as “Life threatener” but they were a tremendous bunch of people and they organised the best wassail ever, when – to the vast annoyance of my evangelical colleagues – I would go full pagan and bless the cider apple trees which Madame had supplied with budwood way back in the day.

They had built a kind of chariot in which the wassail King and Queen – elected in the pub by secret ballot – were hauled up the muddy footpath to perform their ceremonial duties. It was the greatest honour on my retirement party, to travel in the chariot, with a very embarrassed Madame, from the pub to the village hall. Leaving them all was a huge bereavement.

So apples have to be valued as a cultural treasure and not simply a local marketable product. Across the estuary region there are hundreds of local apple varieties. There’s an organization called the Marcher Apple Network which is succeeding in collecting and preserving many of these old varieties. They have an orchard in Powys which we visited and the photos below are of some of the varieties they grow there. This was all so nearly destroyed by the government policy which paid farmers to grub up their orchards so that the long era of the Golden Delicious could begin. Our middle son got a Saturday job hauling trees out with a tractor and chains until the farmer discovered he was only twelve and sacked him. For years we used his abandoned apple boxes around our own garden. This country started to import huge volumes of tasteless and valueless apple lookalikes drenched in chemical sprays and of dubious food value. I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins on this one – “all is seared with trade bleared smeared with toil“.

But Severnside carries on with the old ways reduced to guerilla action. As the old ones die, there are just about enough incomers with the interest and passion to keep the rumour of another way alive. Skilled people who sample the polluted river, make putchers for gardeners; who love the landscape and slap preservation orders on threatened barns and abandoned wooden barges, who record the orchids and wild plants, who rotate the road signs to keep strangers out, who build drystone walls, and who made us welcome for twenty five years.

A Melancholy river III – Putcher fishing

The remains of one of the last putcher ranks near Shepperdine in 2010

What makes history? I’m bound to say that I’m with Alice Oswald on this one. Her long poem “A sleepwalk on the Severn” looks away from connected and confected narrative “A caused B, therefore” – and gathers fragments; the flotsam and jetsam of real life and turns the overheard conversation, the bus tickets, dog ends and litter that flow past us like a river and fashions them into an evocation. History comes back to us after the event. In retrospect the ordinary – ‘the way we did things in those days’ glows with a last ray of sunlight before the sun drops below the horizon. Memory lends new life to the events.

I was sitting in a very boring meeting, gazing out of the window when a tractor and trailer passed slowly down the lane loaded high with salmon putchers, turned off and took the track down to the river Severn. It took years to realize that I might have been witnessing the last time putchers were set up. Of course they haven’t disappeared. They’re good to grow sweet peas up and I daresay they feature in the Chelsea flower show, but like cobblers’ shoe lasts and salt glazed gin bottles they’re more likely to be repurposed as decorative patina by interior designers.

Putchers go back to the 5th century, they’re a five foot long conical basket with a wide opening tapering to a point. They were set up in a rank and the ones I remember and in the photo were arranged in a V shape with the arms opening upstream to catch fish on the ebb tide which, with the poor visibility in the water the fish would enter and find themselves trapped in the putchers which were attached up to five high in the rank. There was another type of putcher called a kype which was longer and the hazel whips were woven tighter towards the end to trap smaller fish.

There was a small shack upstream from Shepperdine and near the ranks which were thicker stakes embedded in the mud. It was here that one of the last fishermen wove his putchers from hazel or withy during the tidal slacks. I met him on the riverbank one day and we had a long conversation in which he told me that he hardly ever caught salmon. He was an ardent royalist, and he said he always sent the first salmon of the season to the then Prince Charles, but the previous season the first fish was also the last. Nonetheless he packed it up and sent it to Highgrove, waiting in vain for any letter of thanks, which left him deeply disappointed rather than angry. The fish, he said were often marked with raw lesions which he suspected were caused by pollution in the river. Some time later I was taking to someone who worked for Imperial (Commonwealth) smelting and asked him if they dumped waste in the river. He freely admitted that they did, but said it was only gypsum, a byproduct of one of their processes. Nearby Albright and Wilson who made some very noxious chemicals, and a fertilizer plant also nearby almost certainly dumped waste in the river. Then only a few weeks ago we watched Michael Sheen’s documentary about the dumping of PCB’s around Wales. It emerged that some of this dangerous waste was being dumped further upstream in the river.

The river bank is wild, and cold winds sweep up the valley forming waves as they blow upstream. Birds gyre and tumble above. The water is bitterly cold, the tide menacing and ignores normal working hours; the mud is thick and glutinous – no place for an easy life. The putchers were emptied at low tide and before the great ecological silence, the salmon were sold locally at a subsistence wage and yet nothing the man said implied that it wasn’t a fulfilling life. Increasing regulation finished what pollution had begun and the only evidence of the practice, the ranks, were left rotting in the mud. I think he was the last one. It still staggers on in the Chepstow side being kept alive by the few remaining licence holders who still practice lave netting.

Elver omelette

Another form of fishing which once provided food was destroyed by industrial poaching and yet more regulation. Our local baker once told me how they would go to some secret spots with nets to catch elvers, baby eels. He described to me in detail the making of elver omelettes: break the eggs and beat them with pepper and salt, tip in the live elvers, cook and eat making sure they’d all stopped wriggling. The perfect breakfast for a young man with a bike and a net who’d been up half the night. But, like wild garlic, black headed gulls’ eggs and wild fungi they represented a lot of money to professional foragers and poachers. The elver population dropped like a stone as they were overfished and sent to Japan as a delicacy. Incidentally the baker, Brian, was one of the few remaining people alive who knew where and when to cross the Severn in the shallows somewhere around Arlingham.

I can see Brian now; a Severnsider to the core getting up at four am every day to make bread for the village. He began his career as a baker by making deliveries with a horse and cart as far away as Oldbury on Severn. He would slip away when the shop was opened by his wife – who came from the forest of Dean across the river – and take his dogs for a walk wearing a Loden cloth jacket and a cloth cap. In the winter he would go rough shooting with Les, the funeral director. He didn’t say much but what he did say had deep roots. The rooted people in the community were its soul; families going back generations and who, as you walked further upstream, would sometimes offer a hint of Welsh in their accents. The river is also a border – the border, porous, without barriers and gun emplacements or men in fatigues but when you cross the M48 bridge you soon realize you’re in another country.

The M4 bridge; Wales in the mist the Severn Beach railway line in the foreground.

A Melancholy River: Severnside II.

A riverside culvert between the River Severn and the Sharpness Gloucester canal.

No I haven’t got the numbering wrong – Part One of what looks like it might be a series is yet to be written; I’ll do it today because like all writers I’m driven by the material which has been demanding that I set it down since I retired ten years ago

I’m not even quite sure what started my imagination boiling but it may have been this photograph, or rather me standing on the banks of the Severn wondering whether it would ever be possible to create image rich writing, linking words and photographs in a way that tells a story but leaves it up to the reader to decide where to start and where to leave. In those days, 20 years ago, The technology was difficult to use and demanded a skill set I never possessed and much more powerful hardware than I could aspire to.

But what I couldn’t show in a single photo was what was behind me on the riverside. It’s a raw and often windswept landscape up there on the Severn. At the point where it joins the Bristol Channel it’s a bleak industrial wasteland and the river itself is unreachable, hidden behind a railway line, giant storage silos, abandoned flour mills, a maze of conveyor belts and gas tanks. For the first mile or so north it continues in much the same way. Huge windmills rotate slowly and, nearby, a pair of gas power station chimneys steam and occasionally belch cumulus clouds that you can see from the motorway which runs two or three miles away along the ridge. You would have to possess a perverse imagination like mine to find much joy in it. There’s even a signposted “Smoke Lane”; there are cement works, lorry depots, warehouses, garages and tyre services and if, like me you have a long memory you could see where Imperial Smelting once stood; and the site of the Albright and Wilson chemical works that blew up after a paperwork mixup united two incompatible and dangerous chemicals; shut down the two motorway bridges and locked the occupiers in thousands of homes as the noxious fumes spread. Further on, the place where the Philblack (later Sevalco) works once covered the landscape with black carbon dust which is an important ingredient of car and lorry tyres.

Gradually as you drive further on, the river appears beyond a narrowing strip of shrubby grassland; the falling tidal flow brown and thick with the sediment it’s picked up on its long journey from the Pumlumon Fawr range in Wales where it begins, so I read, as a hard to find series of small springs. It’s as ugly as sin is alleged to be, and yet, maybe, I’m the greater sinner because I love it. These industrial landscapes are something! Every time I drive along that road I hear the voice of Bob Dylan singing Hard Rain.

I know, I’m not selling it very well but post industrial sites are my thing; dramways, abandoned coal pits, lead and manganese mines all have their botanical survivors and the aficionados who hunt them. The grim road continues north towards the two Severn bridge crossings, passing Severn Beach where birders find a great deal to interest them including Little Owls and all manner of migrating birds. Severn Beach was also, once upon a time, a destination where the single track railway brought thousands of visitors to paddle in the muddy water, bathe in the Blue Lagoon (well actually it was painted blue) and shelter from the wind in rented beach huts. There was even an amusement arcade and cafe owned by a traveller family that I subsequently got to know. One elderly lady I used to visit in Bristol had black and white photographs of the family beach hut on her mantlepiece.

This 25 year old picture of me was taken near the turnstile of the Aust Ferry turnstile where Bob Dylan departed for Cardiff on his controversial electric tour.

Onwards and northwards through Pilning, past the now closed but still a bit whiffy rubbish tip, the old road to the ferry terminal which, when the ferry closed become a favourite dogging spot (I’m told!), and into the more salubrious ruralities like Aust who refused to allow me to take responsibility their church after an unfortunate interview with the churchwarden and his wife who took an instant dislike to me. It was a happy escape for us all. The end of the M48 bridge was where my parishes began and ran upriver to the diocesan border to somewhere near Oldbury on Severn. I had skin in the game!

So why do I call myself Severnsider? given my lukewarm enthusiasm for its tidal estuary. Good question. Here- maybe – is part of the answer

One of the scuttled vessels at the Purton ship’s graveyard.

Behind the culvert in my first photo there is this hulk, plus many others, scuttled on the river bank. I used to go fishing on the canal. Pastoral work can be pretty punishing and after a particularly hard funeral – children for instance – I used to go there, more to sit quietly than to catch anything. Canal fishing is a difficult and specialised skill. In parish ministry you become the lightning rod for a lot of horrible situations and there’s no-one you can tell or talk to. The river runs alongside the canal at Purton and this mysterious collection of dead boats on the river intrigued me. In my imagination a catastrophic downturn in trade, or the coming of the railway or some other market crash led to the scrapping of the boats. There are lots of them and they make a melancholy sight which often chimed with my mood. Here are some more photos:

The real reason for this mas extinction event was that when the river broke its banks – as it often does – the destructive power and speed of the tide (the second highest tidal range in the world) threatened the integrity of the canal bank and by extension the canal itself. So these ships which included Severn trows, concrete and steel barges were towed to the spot and sunk in order to protect the canal. Some of the boats are now protected sites due to their age and rarity. My fascination with this stretch of the river never went away. There was more to it, though. My grandfather determined early on that I was going to read Dickens, and was always ready to lend me his own copies. Is it at all significant that the two favourite authors of my early reading life were HG Wells (hence the Potwell Inn) and Charles Dickens (hence the identification with Ham Peggotty, and upturned boats? These were the geographical heftings of my young imagination and so finding them in real life was a kind of homecoming. Magwitch, Peggotty and Polly haunted my dreams and still visit me now.

There’s so much more to write about the Severn and next time I’ll be remembering the last putcher and kype fishermen, ending a tradition that lasted from the 5th century, and elver omelettes of course along with a new and revelatory understanding of why the salmon developed lesions.

The Severn further upriver near Arlingham where you can see (and hear) the Severn Bore

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a dog.

Well it wasn’t quite a conversation. I was holding a gate open for Madame when a dog – it was a Springer spaniel – rushed past me nose down, hoovering up a scent line as they do, head low and moving from side to side, tail held almost straight out in a don’t bother me, I’m busy – sort of fashion. I could see its owners about 30 yards back on the track and I said to the dog “Hello you”. The dog being otherwise engaged barely paused to look at me and stopped his forward dash, turned on a sixpence and ran back to his owners. I walked on with Madame and, maybe thirty yards later, a light went on in my head and I realized I’d not only spoken to the dog but I’d spoken in dialect. I was so taken by this slip (I’ve had many decades of practice at not slipping into dialect and I think it was because I was talking to a dog. “You” – used as a pronoun in Gloucestershire used to be confined to strangers and could be construed as faintly hostile. I worked as a labourer in an engineering company when I was about seventeen; after leaving school unceremoniously accompanied by the Headmaster who had me by the shirt collar. This company was in the process of moving from farm buildings to sheet metalworking and chemical engineering and highly skilled (coded) welders were worth their weight in gold. Twin brothers were the welding superstars; they’d both worked on pressure vessels in nuclear power stations and they were so indispensable to the company that they freely abused the managers with the most foul insults. I learned a great deal from them. Anyway, to get back to the point, they never addressed me as anything other than “you”. They would invariably greet me with a surly “alright you?” which absolutely did not require an answer.

But why the sudden “you”? was it because it still lives there unused in my everyday conversations? the bedrock language of my locality. It still seems very precious to me. When I go to the local sawmill to buy posts for the allotment, all the people on the counter speak like me – not like my dad who was Bristolian, or my mum who came from deepest Oxfordshire – but like the language of my childhood’ the language that A F Woodman our Music teacher would try to din out of us. “Boughten” was one of his pet hates. “Thee” and “thou” still had some lingering currency among our elders. When I hear it echoed today it moves me, makes me feel at home, because in its dropped aitches and extended aar sounds, in its you’s and thee’s and its overall timbre and slow pace it gives me a place, a location. Without a local accent of some kind, words are like bus stops without a grid reference – meaningless until you know where to find them. The minute particulars of pronunciation function like tags; they signal important information about the speaker and their message to any listeners who are attuned to the patterns. The last person I knew who spoke full Gloucestershire was Lenny Clark, a fine gardener who died a few years ago. The difference between you and thee , like the French tu and vous are important indicators of relationship and we’ve let them go, although the now redundant differences in speech still express the same divisions in society. Some like to imagine that people who cling to local speech patterns are slow witted and stupid. I think that those people who speak like politicians without giving any clue where they come from, and what background, what hinterland they have – are the true citizens of nowhere. When they appear on the national news I make tea because the voice of authority hides behind received pronunciation – it’s disembodied, bloodless. I don’t suppose there’s much trace of Gloucestershire in my voice these days but that’s where I come from.

There are two bits of data you need to plan any journey on a map. Firstly you need to know where North is but crucially you need to know exactly where you are, where the starting point is on the map. If a harbour is the place a hero sets out from, not knowing where you belong, where you’re starting from, means you’re lost as soon as you sail over the horizon.

I used to walk with a retired farmhand on the banks of the river Severn, and one day he amazed me by naming, with their local names, the fields almost a mile away on the far side of the river. When I speak, I speak with the ghostly voices of my dad, a railwayman; my mother, a dressmaker; my grandfather, a carpenter and smallholder; and all the people I’ve known – not least the already mentioned A F Woodman who taught me to love music, and Chris Levinson who introduced me to the Beat Poets. I went to a so-called technical school but listened to the voice of Chaucer read in its rich original dialect by another English teacher, and learned French from a teacher who seemed to have spent the war in France. There’s a lot of freight in a voice if you care to honour it, and none at all in the aetiolated speech of those who’ve left their history in the dustbin. Losing thee means we have no way of signalling a whole stage of human connection.

This is not in any sense an appeal to return to a kind of local tribalism but to escape the awful snobbery of the tribe which most often causes the trouble and whose dialect history has been brushed away by many coats of magnolia so they can advance in their social class. A truly diverse society wouldn’t insist on young people airbrushing their local dialects out of existence. We can all learn to hear each other. I barely speak a word of Welsh but even I can hear in a sentence or two whether the speaker is from North or South Wales , or Pembrokeshire, or somewhere in the borders west of the Severn, or from the Valleys where I once worked for a while running worker-writers’ workshops.

I called the dog “you” instinctively because we didn’t know one another. The dog, possibly understanding the nuance scooted back to its owner. I think that’s quite wonderful – how about thee?

The River Severn at Purton

Turning a photo into a story and then into a post

There are two questions here that I’m trying to answer. The first is the title of this post, and the second is an attempt at explaining why I call myself Severnsider – and I’ll tackle that one first.

I think these photos were taken some time around 2007, although I’d known the place for years prior to that. If you live nearby, or know the river Severn on the Gloucestershire side you’ll probably know where they were taken on the Gloucestershire riverside and along the Sharpness canal at Frampton on Severn. The Severn is, as you can see, a very wide river but dangerous for larger ships to navigate above Sharpness due to the ferocious tides, winds and sandbanks. There was also a problem in sailing around a sharp bend in Arlingham which is a good place to watch the Severn bore but a very bad place for a sailing ship. The canal, opened in 1827, could carry ships up to 600 tons and was once the largest and deepest (18 feet) canal in the world . It was a safe, non-tidal shortcut to Gloucester docks. Over the decades we’ve fished in the canal, walked its towpath and paddled up it in our kayak. There are many places I love and visit but in a strange way, the river Severn has my soul. One of my parishes bordered the bank and it’s always been a place of solace on difficult days – lonely, quite remote in places with huge skies and a tide so fierce you can hear it above the mournful cries of wintering curlew.

As the tide from the Bristol channel meets the river there’s the meeting of two distinct modes of being – each with its own smell; earthy, mountainous river and salt tide. Twice a day, the inbreathing and outbreathing flows change places and command the landscape. Springs and neaps cover and reveal the mudflats

The Severn has wonderful sunsets, and on special evenings you can hear migrating geese and swans flying noisily towards the tidal marshes at Slimbridge. It’s a sound so haunting that it will freeze your blood. On one occasion I was walking on the bank at Shepperdine when a hare raced up the field to my right, leaped over a broken wooden fence and crossed, feet in front of me in mid-air. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. It was there, at high tide in the middle of the river and just inside our parish, that I scattered the ashes of a Severn pilot, a man with a lifetime of experience of the twists and turns and shifting sandbanks of the river who would take charge of ships travelling upstream . One of the crew opened a steel door in the side of the Balmoral and to the accompaniment of long blasts on the steam whistle, we poured his ashes into the water just as the tide turned and the river stood still. The trippers on the deck above us had no idea what was happening below them. The two waterways, canal and river, run side by side; the contained and dredged canal -an industrial relic of a past age and its wild and untamable neighbour. A watery Cain and Abel in perpetual conflict like the two sides of a human soul.

Inevitably, as a parish priest, I became a kind of story keeper; privy to many secrets and at ease with the history of the landscape and the people who lived in it because – in a very important sense – they were one. I may well have seen the last ever trailer load of salmon putchers being taken down to the river. The village baker’s wife and her husband had roots in both sides of the river, and would often talk about elver fishing and elver omelette where the freshly caught baby eels were tipped alive into the egg mixture in the pan. He remembered delivering bread by horse and cart. The orchards along the river were protected from frosts by the thermal mass of the water and thousands of gallons of cider were once made on local farms to slake the thirst of the labourers. I got to know one or two of the surviving cider makers pretty well. I once asked one of them why he liked cider so much and he answered “because it gets I pissed!”. The local funeral director was another hefted man who began life as a builder and joiner and made coffins according to the custom of the day; graduating to funeral directing as a natural progression. The gravedigger would always discreetly press a jelly baby or some other sweet into my hand as we processed to the graveside. It was a surviving custom from when everyone was rewarded in cash after a funeral. We referred to one another as gentlemen and bowed as if we were born to it.

I was the story keeper because I took many of the village funerals, weddings and baptisms. I have never felt able to write about those years in any detail because so much of what I knew was told to me in confidence, but I learned the skill of discreet storytelling over three decades, slipping in a coded morsel known only to the closest friends when I could. Most of the old ways and those who followed them are gone now and the suburban villages empty of commuters and refill again in the evenings. The salmon have all-but disappeared and the churches are shrinking and falling into disuse.

Oh yes; the Severn is a very special place and having lived next to it for 25 years it’s the reason I use the name Severnsider. Although these days we live in Bath, the campervan is stored near the banks of the Severn, and the river Avon on whose bank we now live, is a tributary to the mother river which it joins at Avonmouth.

Anyway enough history, because I want to move on to the more interesting question of storytelling with pictures, and the impact of computer technology enabling us to do things we could not have contemplated thirty years ago when I stood on the riverbank, looking at the long row of apparently abandoned barges, hauled up and left to rot. I know, of course that there was a story shouting to come out of the landscape. The melancholic look of rusting hulks and concrete tow barges sinking inexorably into the estuary mud suggested a catastrophic collapse in the market of some commodity. That was a wrong assumption as it turned out because they were deliberately scuttled there in an attempt to protect the river bank from erosion. The pictures haunted me.

I knew I had the raw materials of a new way of understanding landscape but there seemed to be no way of making it work. I wanted to find a way of telling stories with pictures and text but which you could enter at any point, and so read in any order – which is much closer to the way we actually apprehend landscape in real life. Then I discovered HTML but not being very computer literate, the learning curve defeated me. It was the arrival of journaling software and later blogging software that finally opened the door for me. I could utilise the thousands of photographs I’d taken over the years and write accompanying text that could illuminate any topic I was writing about. The photos weren’t eye catching snapshots but little visual haiku, working with the text to say what couldn’t easily be said in words. They became little essays, often exploring a single idea with no attempt for them to be amalgamated into a theory of everything. By now there are over a thousand of them, rapidly approaching a million words in a form that can be searched by date, by topic, by keyword or even just with a single search term.

All this because a single photograph can conjure up a whole habitat or environment; a whole history of the people who live and work in it and occasionally amount to a funeral sermon for something or someone lost forever. This photograph, for instance, taken on Thursday at Big Pit above Blaenavon suggests to me something that’s not telling the whole story; that needs unpacking. The bright red paint and hand lettering suggest that this truck does not, any longer, contain explosives at all. It’s there for effect, as part of an experience – which is what it is, of course. Possibly a film set.

But this one, taken moments later, is telling a more subtle story; of abandonment and dereliction. Present and past are expressed in the course of a few words on a screen. Now we know that something infinitely less fun is going on. There are two steam engines there, each of them deserving restoration but lacking the funds to do it. In a supreme irony, the high quality steam coal which was mined here and which is needed by every steam restoration project in the UK can no longer be mined because of the environmental damage caused by burning coal. We were told that the last two shipments of steam coal came by boat from Chile and Australia. So coal will still be burned but also thousands of tons of oil burned added to the total environmental cost. A third photograph has an entirely more melancholy feel because behind the abandoned winch gear, and in the distance, lies a town that feels as abandoned as the headworks of the pit. With the end of coal mining, thousands of jobs were lost and never replaced with skilled work. Coal was King and now unemployment drains the eviscerated community below. The museum is a marvellous and pointed reminder of yet another lost community.

Oh how miserable this is sounding! Let’s turn to nature. Many of the thousands of photographs I’ve taken are of plants, fungi and even insects. They’re the other part of landscape – the micro features that make it what it is. You’ll know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, that I’m pretty passionate about the waifs and strays of the plant world which find a place to settle in precisely the abandoned post industrial sites, marginal environments and polluted earth that – like the human communities that once lived and worked in them – have fallen silent as the dreams of the industrial revolution; of easy lives and plentiful housing and food for all come to dust. Things are unravelling and we all know it, in spite of the performative idiocy of politicians who think that having your photo taken with a hi-viz jacket, hard hat and sleeves rolled up is a substitute for having any idea or plan for the future.

Is it even possible to love a despoiled landscape and yet hate what caused it? I think I’m able to address that paradox in a way that might offer a way forward. Firstly the earth doesn’t need us nearly as much as we need the earth, and so in recording what’s there needn’t be a source of anger is much as an encouragement and inspiration to do better. To do better for human communities, to do better for the plants and insects and animals share the earth with us. On our walk in the Bannau Brycheiniog on Thursday we were looking at some slime moulds – a subject which I know almost nothing about. But I did a quick search in Merlin Sheldrake’s book “Entangled Life” and discovered that the humble slime mould can help to make a map to escape from an Ikea store with no more encouragement than a few bright lights and some oatmeal. We dismiss the strange intelligence of nature at our peril. We shall need to review, and experiment and rethink the way we do things around here – I mean our whole culture – in a way that no-one in living memory has had to do because the crisis is here. Even our short journey across the Severn was delayed by 24 hours by an unprecedented storm. Our memories of the past need not fall into the trap of sentimentality and nostalgia. We can be grown-up enough to see that the communities built up by mining had costs as well as benefits and we need not return to the whole package of riches extracted and suffering exacted. What nature demonstrates is the persistence that comes from environmental stability, and so to finish here’s a photograph taken on our friends’ smallholding of a small patch of ancient woodland which has been protected by the steepness of the field in which it stands.

A cautionary true story about my favourite river.

On 30 January 1607, around noon, the coasts of the Bristol Channel suffered from unexpectedly high floodings that broke the coastal defences in several places. Low-lying places in Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and South Wales were flooded. The devastation was particularly severe on the Welsh side, extending from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire to above Chepstow in Monmouthshire. Cardiff was the most badly affected town, with the foundations of St Mary’s Church destroyed.

It is estimated that 2,000 or more people were drowned, houses and villages were swept away, an estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) of farmland inundated, and livestock destroyed, wrecking the local economy along the coasts of the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary.

The coast of Devon and the Somerset Levels as far inland as Glastonbury Tor, 14 miles (23 km) from the coast, were also affected. The sea wall at Burnham-on-Sea gave way, and the water flowed over the low-lying levels and moors.

Wikipedia

Of course, you might think, it could never happen again here. You might think it but it would be wishful thinking. I’ll come to that in a moment. The domain name for this blog is “Severnsider” for a reason. I’ve loved the Severn since long before I found myself working in a parish whose boundary ran somewhere in the middle of it. I knew the parish boundary well enough to guide the skipper of the paddle steamer MV Balmoral to the spot where I once slipped the ashes of a retired Severn Pilot called Peter into the swirling waters, to the mournful sound of three long blasts on the ship’s steam whistle.

The river Severn is Britain’s longest river at 220 miles and it can be dangerous; overtopping its banks regularly as floodwaters pour down from the Cambrian Mountains, joined by its many tributaries. The estuary itself, is vulnerable to the South westerly prevailing winds and has the largest volume of water flowing into the sea of any river in England and Wales. When the enormous downstream spring tides meet gale force winds blowing upstream, flooding will follow as night follows day. Not often, but often enough in the past and in the last decades becoming the norm.

As a river it’s been hammered by industrial developments and pollution, warm water from a couple of (now closed) nuclear power stations and more recently by the eutrophication of large stretches by intensive farming – especially in the River Wye which joins the Severn beside the first modern Bridge carrying the M48. I knew the last putcher fisherman on our side of the river and he once told me that salmon were turning up with terrible sores on their flesh. Before he gave up he said he’d only caught three fish in several years.

Nobody in Government seems at all keen to tackle the pollution, but the many thousands of homes on the floodplain are a real political problem when, year after year they’re being inundated for weeks on end by filthy polluted water – and so in these decades of austerity, the combined forces of local, regional and national funding have found £100 million to improve flood defences . Amazon have built a huge warehouse in the middle of one of the affected areas and their astute tax lawyers will have made quite sure that none of their profits are diverted into protecting their own warehouse.

Notwithstanding all these problems the Severn still manages to be a hauntingly beautiful river; visible from miles away as a silver ribbon threading down through small farms and villages with their patchwork fields divided by rhynes and cider orchards along with one of my clutch of country parishes whose church and churchyard were sensibly built on a prominent knoll from which I expect to spend eternity keeping an eye on the river from my high vantage point – immune to winter storms and exalting in the sounds of migrating geese.

Anyway, enough maundering; my point is that the river floods but over the past years £100 million are being expended on keeping our feet dry. Except …….

For the past eight years we’ve kept our campervan in a locked compound barely fifty yards from the sea wall. There were occasions, before the works began, when we kept an anxious eye on the weather forecasts and then after a couple of major floodings up and down stream we joined an automatic warning service which sends out a text message when flooding is expected. We hadn’t expected that yesterday – well outside the normal flooding season – we would receive this text message.

Flood Alert Issued. Severn Estuary at Severn Beach. floodline.uk/112WATSVN1. To hear more information on this Alert, call Floodline 0345 9881188,8

UK Floodline alert.

Once again, the same scenario as 1607. A flood tide meeting stormwater plus a Southwesterly upstream gale heaps up the water (106 cubic metres a second at Apperly on a normal day – that’s a lot of double decker buses!) – and the defences are broached – even after all that money is being spent!

The point of all this is that we’re not preparing for the catastrophic effects of global climate change, we’re limping along after it; parsimoniously spending too little and too late while doing nothing to address the causes. Here we are again as politicians gather in Egypt for COP 27 and make promises they’ve no intention of keeping, while the lobbyists and their tame journalists spend billions persuading us that there’s no cause for alarm – it’s all a long way away and somewhere else. Well it isn’t. It’s right here and right now

But to say a little more about Peter, the Severn pilot. I discovered that during the 2nd World War he would pilot the petrol barges up from Avonmouth to the lock at Purton, just below the old railway bridge. In wartime this was a terribly hazardous journey against fierce tides, numerous underwater shallows and a winding course without the benefit of radar or even lights. Peter – who was a quiet and thoughtful man, would walk the banks of the Severn whenever he had some time off – to memorise the hazards. At his funeral service one of his old friends told me that one day he was prowling the bank in thick fog and as a ship drew near he heard a voice calling – “Is that you Peter?” On  25 October 1960 a couple of petrol barges misjudged the lock at Sharpness and were swept out of control upstream, colliding with one of the piers of the Severn Railway Bridge which, in the ensuing explosion and fire, collapsed. Five crew members died that night. The Severn has claimed many more victims over the previous centuries and we can only hope that she will not take many more lives as a consequence of our wishful thinking about climate change.

Storm Dennis – counting the cost

So leaving Birmingham we decided to drive south and west across to the Malvern Hills and go for a walk with our son.  We used to visit the Malverns frequently when the children were young but we haven’t been there for at least four years since we moved to Bath – it’s that little bit too far now for a spontaneous walk. This place, on the border between Herefordshire and Worcestershire overlooks the Severn Valley to the East, forming the the Vale of Evesham with the River Wye to the West so it was as good a place as any to see the effects of the flooding from the vantage point of the hills.  There was no doubting the effects on the roads – there were warning signs of road closures all the way down the M5 and there was much more traffic than usual on the motorway – not least lorries trying to find an unblocked way west.

The whole area is regularly beset with flooding, but in the last few years it’s got progressively worse. The relentless rain during this winter has left the valleys waterlogged and unable to cope with the additional flow. What makes it even trickier is the fact that there are always two peaks of flooding – the first coming directly off the land locally and the second, a couple of days later, is formed by the floodwaters flowing down from the mountainous catchment area around Plynlimon in mid-Wales.  What that means, of course, is that the long term remedy for flooding needs to be sought in changes in farming and building practices in the most populated areas downriver, but also in the headwater region.  The Malvern Hills which occupy the area between the Wye and the Severn is a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and has 15 SSSI’s within its boundaries. It’s also managed by the Malvern Conservators founded by act of parliament in 1884 – so you can see it’s a pretty heavily regulated area.

IMG_20200218_120834That’s just to set the scene a bit – yesterday we set off from Hollybush in deteriorating weather and by the time we got to the top of the first climb it was sheeting down, blowing a hoolie and extremely cold.  We carried on and the weather slowly improved and by the time we got to Sally’s Place (great refreshment hut) at British Camp, the sun had put in an appearance. But looking out towards the Severn from the vantage point of the hilltop we could see how much flooding there is at the moment. It’s not possible to discern the actual course of the river unless it’s by the tops of the bankside trees.  For the most part the flooding extends for several fields either side, and of course larger towns like Upton on Severn, Tewkesbury and Worcester (OK I know it’s a city but writing the list any other way looks pedantic!) – are severely affected once again. After a four hour walk out and back we arrived at Hollybush again just as the rain got organised and we drove home in opposite directions, both of us – it turned out – in appalling driving conditions.

Back in Bath, the river is continuing to fill, and we discovered that yesterday it covered Pulteney weir for the first time since 1960 when 7 people died in the floods. Bathampton Meadows are underwater again – doing exactly what they’re meant to do, which is to store floodwater.  It still amazes me that even as late as 2017 the local authority were still trying to turn this nature reserve into a park and ride scheme. If you’re looking for an example of cognitive dissonance look no further. The latest flood risk assessment sounds breezily confident that the risk isn’t rising, and there are plans to decommission the floodgates at Pulteney weir. The strategy for dealing with the climate crisis at government level seems to be to tell us to stick our fingers in our ears and shout “la la la la” very loudly. Those of us who remember the similarly laughable “protect and survive” campaign will recall that the then government advised us that the best protection against all-out nuclear war was to whitewash the windows and hide under a table. That was what we were meant to do at least, the government plans for themselves involved moving into nuclear bomb proof shelters, curiously named “regional seats of government” and sitting it out until it was safe to emerge and govern the smoking radioactive ashes. One recently discovered criminal repurposing of an abandoned nuclear shelter was to use it to grow cannabis on an industrial scale – you couldn’t make this stuff up!

Anyway, if all this doesn’t constitute a crisis I don’t know what does.  Everywhere we looked we could see the stubble from last year’s fodder maize crop.  The land is too wet to sow seed and consequently the top soil is being washed into the rivers, further depleting the earth. I read through a couple of the many official reports concerning the Malvern Hills when we got home, and one of them suggested that one effect of global heating might be to allow farmers to take two crops a year.  Merciful heavens! that surely means we’ll simply exhaust the soil that much quicker unless we make radical changes.

Traditionally, Japanese potters would dig porcellanous and stoneware clays and store them for their grandchildren to use. These clays lacked plasticity and prolonged storage after initial preparation made them easier, although never easy, to use. We need politicians to move to a similar timescale. We need to stop asking what will be the case in five or ten years time , and soberly consider what it might be in fifty. To paraphrase an earlier teacher:

For what will it profit us if we hoard our savings but lose the whole earth?