Drift with Dragonflies: A Canoe Trip on the River Severn near Shrewsbury
My first outdoor solo swim – when I was around 10 – was across the River Wye. I had just read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and thought swimming would be good preparation before building a raft and escaping to another adventure. The slow, muscular water lifted me up and carried me downstream, brushing patches of crow's feet, with its meandering fronds and underwater flowers protruding, miraculously, from riffles and riffles. The first tickles made me gasp in fear, but I got used to it. I had no idea at the time that this plant was an important signifier of river health. When I reached the other side, cows were watching me. I turned and fled into the water.
The Wye has been synonymous with beautiful countryside since the 1770s, when William Gilpin awarded it the title of " picturesque". By 1800 there were 20 guides to the area, and the crowning achievement of many studies was a watercolor sketchbook of river views. Little did Reverend Gilpin suspect, however, that the same industrial society that had accelerated his romantic appreciation of natural beauty would also threaten to engulf his favorite topographic feature. Over the past decade the Wye has begun to deteriorate. Instead of insects, the air is filled with clouds of bluster, thicker than sewer soup, more pristine than the walls of a mega chicken farm. Anglers don't catch salmon. Swimmers get sick. Birdwatchers are birdless.
I landed questions about the River Severn. Never as famous as the Wye, and never embraced by visitors in the same way, the Severn is longer and even more crucial to our natural world. It rises at Plynlimon in the Cambrian Mountains, where the Wye also begins, but then curves larger and more expansively, cutting through the Welsh hills and into Shropshire before finally turning south past Shrewsbury, Gloucester and Worcester. If the Wye is in trouble, we should fear for its twin.
I meet Kieran and Danni from Hire-a-Canoe in Montford Bridge, a small village 20 km away upstream from Shrewsbury and the site of the first bridge designed by Thomas Telford, a three-arched red sandstone beauty that still stands, the first of more than 1,000 bridges he worked on. We also have Jake Evans, a local storyteller, with us, adding some color. "Outlaw Humphrey Kynaston is supposed to be...
My first outdoor solo swim – when I was around 10 – was across the River Wye. I had just read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and thought swimming would be good preparation before building a raft and escaping to another adventure. The slow, muscular water lifted me up and carried me downstream, brushing patches of crow's feet, with its meandering fronds and underwater flowers protruding, miraculously, from riffles and riffles. The first tickles made me gasp in fear, but I got used to it. I had no idea at the time that this plant was an important signifier of river health. When I reached the other side, cows were watching me. I turned and fled into the water.
The Wye has been synonymous with beautiful countryside since the 1770s, when William Gilpin awarded it the title of " picturesque". By 1800 there were 20 guides to the area, and the crowning achievement of many studies was a watercolor sketchbook of river views. Little did Reverend Gilpin suspect, however, that the same industrial society that had accelerated his romantic appreciation of natural beauty would also threaten to engulf his favorite topographic feature. Over the past decade the Wye has begun to deteriorate. Instead of insects, the air is filled with clouds of bluster, thicker than sewer soup, more pristine than the walls of a mega chicken farm. Anglers don't catch salmon. Swimmers get sick. Birdwatchers are birdless.
I landed questions about the River Severn. Never as famous as the Wye, and never embraced by visitors in the same way, the Severn is longer and even more crucial to our natural world. It rises at Plynlimon in the Cambrian Mountains, where the Wye also begins, but then curves larger and more expansively, cutting through the Welsh hills and into Shropshire before finally turning south past Shrewsbury, Gloucester and Worcester. If the Wye is in trouble, we should fear for its twin.
I meet Kieran and Danni from Hire-a-Canoe in Montford Bridge, a small village 20 km away upstream from Shrewsbury and the site of the first bridge designed by Thomas Telford, a three-arched red sandstone beauty that still stands, the first of more than 1,000 bridges he worked on. We also have Jake Evans, a local storyteller, with us, adding some color. "Outlaw Humphrey Kynaston is supposed to be...
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