Day 17. Frampton to Berkeley.

Thursday 8 September.

We left the Bell Inn at 9:15 am, and turned left toward  the Gloucester to Sharpness canal, which we were to follow for 7 miles. It was a sunny day, but windy and got windier as we approached Sharpness. Look at the water surfaces in today's photographs.

The first photo is a view north from the swing bridge at Frampton, note the sunny sky. The following photo was taken looking south from the towpath near the 7 mile marker. Note how far ahead Shiel is!

We've seen an abundance of blackberries this year and I've added a photo to prove the point. We passed about five people collecting them today, not many for seven miles of blackberries.

On the west bank of the canal we passed a hairy black horse but we don't know the breed, see photo. If you look carefully though you might just see the Severn river a long way away in the backgound. That is about to change.

The next photo is just to give you an idea of a typical canal view. It is followed by the picture of a swing bridge. Behind the bridge is a little bridge house and this is shown alone in the next photograph. We've passed a lot of these,
invariably adjacent to a bridge.

Passing through Purton we came to a ship's graveyard, described in the next picture, in a sign we photographed. To get to it you take a side path to the west of the canal, shown in the next picture. If you can resolve the seat in the photo, that is where we ate lunch. We were seated facing the river Severn, muddy brown water on the RHS of the picture. The grey blue water on the LHS of the picture is the canal. They are very close at this point, hence the graveyard. To avoid the Severn eroding its way into the canal wall a large number of defunct barges were filled with silt or concrete and beached on the east bank of the Severn last centuary. A list of all the vessel names is posted near to where we had lunch. One of the sunken barges is in the next photograph.

A bit nearer Sharpness we passed the remains of a railbridge (photo) that spanned the Severn. Two vessels trying to get to Sharpness in thick fog missed the harbour and ran into the bridge in October 1960. Although 19 years old at the time I can't remember hearing about it. Note how blue the canal water looks, and the rough surface whipped up by the wind. Note also the wall in the picture. It is shown better in the next picture. It acts as a final barrier between the Severn and the canal, or so it appeared to us.

The next photo shows the view down the canal to Sharpness and is followed with a view to the west, over the Severn (at the other side of the wall). Note the colour change.

The white house, in the next photograph was located at the end of the canal, near a gate to the Severn. We turned East at this point, behind the wind turbine, (which wasn't turning) shown in the next photograph. Perhaps it was too windy. I had problems holding the cell phone steady in the wind!

We continued east over a bridge which gave the view of Sharpness docks in the next photograph and walked up to join a road heading south through housing. We headed west from the road, over the railway line shown in the next photograph to join the Severn stop bank.

The next photograph is taken looking south from the stop bank. We could see two defunct nuclear power stations (Berkeley and Oldbury) and the Severn bridges in the distance. I cannot resolve the bridges in your low resolution copy but they are visible in the original.

The penultimate photograph, taken to the north, shows Shiel battling south into the strong SW wind.  It was good for walking but a tad on the strong side.

The final picture shows the river flowing into the Severn which blocked our path and where we had to turn East towards Berkeley. It was a little tricky but we managed to get a footpath all the way to the bottom of the street with our B&B in it. We are writing this in Perrots House B&B. We arrived at 16:05, five minutes after they open. About 6 hours 50 minutes and 18.5 km (measured from map).