Photo: Hudson.
THE SEVERN BRIDGE, SHARPNESS (p. [123]).
Telford spanned the Severn with an arch of stone 150 feet in diameter, and below Gloucester the railway runs on a viaduct across the meadows, Alney Island, and the river. The valley now is becoming very wide, and seems to hint that before long the Severn will broaden into an estuary. The river begins to swing in huge curves through the level meadows. The tidal wave, called “the bore,” sometimes attains a considerable height, and is one of its “wonders.” The Malvern Hills have receded into the background, and their place is taken by May Hill, famous among geologists; on the opposite side the scarp of the Cotswolds continues, though with a rather more broken outline; but outlying hills come nearer to the city.
The Severn ebbs and flows by Minsterworth, where Gwillim is buried, whose heraldry was beloved by country squires. The main high road, when possible, keeps away from the stream, for the land lies low and is liable to floods. Westbury-on-Severn is the first place of mark—a small town with a rather large church noted for having a separate steeple, the spire of which is of wood. The Severn here has pressed against higher ground and has carved it into a low cliff, which affords sections well known to every geologist; and in the neighbourhood iron ore is worked, as it has been for many a century. Newnham comes next, a market-town, and an outlet for the important mining district of the Forest of Dean, which lies a few miles away to the west. It still preserves a sword of state given to it by King John, and there is some old Norman work in its church.
The Severn is now changing from a river to an estuary. No places of importance lie near the riverside, and its scenery is becoming marshy and monotonous; but some distance away to the east is Berkeley, an old town with an old castle, memorable for the murder of the hapless Edward; and on the other side is Lydney, a quaint little town with a small inland harbour, a market cross, and a fine old church. In the adjacent park, on a kind of elevated terrace overlooking the valley, are the remains of a group of Roman villas, from which many coins, pieces of pottery, and other relics have been unearthed.
At Sharpness, above Lydney, a railway crosses the Severn by a long bridge of twenty-eight arches, a magnificent work; but below it ferryboats were the only communication from shore to shore till in 1886 the completion of the Severn Tunnel linked Bristol and the West more closely to the eastern part of South Wales. At this point the river is more than two and a quarter miles across; but the tunnel itself is about double that length. This, the greatest work of its kind in Britain, was completed by the late Sir John Hawkshaw.
The banks become yet farther apart, the water is salt, the tide ebbs and flows, as in the sea. The estuary, indeed, continues for many a mile, still retaining the form of a river-valley. Very probably there was a time when a Severn flowed along a broad valley, where now the Bristol Channel parts England from South Wales, to join another stream which had descended over land, now sunk beneath the Irish Sea, and the two rivers discharged their united waters into a more distant Atlantic Ocean; but that was very long ago, so that our task is now completed. We have followed the Severn from its source to its ending—till our brook has become a river, and our river has become a sea.
T. G. BONNEY.