RIVER SEVERN AND GLOUCESTER & SHARPNESS CANAL

摘要

There's a world of difference between the River Severn and the last river-based waterway we covered - the Calder & Hebble, the subject of our September Canal Boat cruise guide. Whereas the Calder was very much a 'river navigation' - a waterway created by building locks and artificial cuts, interspersed with lengths of river - the Severn is much more of a 'navigable river', with almost all of the navigable 43 miles from Stourport to Gloucester following the natural river, and locks generally few and far between. Until the 1840s even those few locks had yet to be built, and boats arriving on the river from the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal at Stourport, where we begin our journey, would have had a lock-free clear run down the river, all the way through to the tidal estuary. That's when there was enough water for them: for two months of a typical summer, navigation from Worcester up to Stourport on the unimproved river wasn't possible at all.