The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [113]
This demesne of plasticity and promise was a strange contrast with the gruff solidity of the river itself; the wharves, factories, chimneys and container ships, even the reed beds, swans and geese. Across the water, the towers of Canary Wharf glittered icily, looking way beyond reach or even belief. ‘This is great, isn’t it?’ I enthused to my cariad. ‘Hmmmm,’ he replied, which I took as a yes. We turned the corner of the peninsula and headed down towards Greenwich, but the Thames Path wasn’t playing. Signs announced a diversion, but it soon petered out and left us wandering hopelessly through industrial estates, along a busy dual carriageway, past cranes and concrete mixers, under CCTV cameras and hoops of razor wire. Eventually, after many wrong turns, we landed in the gentrified streets that announced our imminent arrival in Greenwich. ‘Er, I think I’ll go and see the Chelsea Physic Garden,’ he muttered as we sank a pint in the Cutty Sark Tavern on the quay. He was off before I could say, ‘But hang on in there, it’s Deptford and Rotherhithe next.’ Returning that evening, he pointedly compared the two halves of his day: my trip in the morning through noxious mud and rusty dereliction, his trip in the afternoon along perfumed walkways and shimmering walls of fern.
So much for the Thames. The Severn is my river – I grew up by it, went to school right next to it and have its source just a few miles from where I live in the otherwise foreign mountains. When I was considering moving to Wales, the Severn was the thread that kept me linked to all that had come before: it was the liquid guarantee that my old life and my new life could be bridged. I’ve paddled and swum in it, waded through it, fallen into it, skimmed stones across it, picnicked and gossiped and canoodled on its banks, sailed down it in dinghies, a narrowboat, a raft, a kayak, a party boat and even, between the two Severn Bridges, a 400-tonne sand dredger.
The Severn Way is the path that attempts to follow the river from its source on Pumlumon, a mountain disguised as an upland sponge, squatting like a fat, dripping toad in the very middle of Wales. On any old map, from the fourteenth-century Gough Map to those derived from the Tudor splendours of Saxton and Speed, Pumlumon is shown as Snowdon’s equal, despite being only the 49th-highest peak in Wales. It wasn’t the physical reality of the mountain being mapped, but its reputation; a place to bewilder and disorientate invaders coursing into Wales from the east. It’s likely too that such cartographic prominence was a nod to the mountain’s place as the birthplace of two great national rivers, the Severn and the Wye. The Severn Way steers quite a haphazard course, for there are many stretches of the river jealously guarded and out of bounds, so that you can sometimes walk it for hours without actually seeing the Severn itself. With only the slightest hint of disingenuousness, this is presented on the website promoting the trail as ‘the Severn Way does not simply follow riverside paths, but is routed to help the walker make the most of the countryside.’ There is a point there, I suppose, for sometimes it is good to break the hypnotic allure of the water and see a little more of the context of its sinuous course.
The best bits of the Severn Way, though, are undoubtedly the riverside stretches. Once it gets into its stride, the river is such a languid beast, and to follow it for mile after mile, with no need to check the map or work out where’s next, is an easy thrill like no other. My finest walk on it was the most recent, a day in May with my dad strolling from Worcester back up to his home near Stourport. We’d started the previous day on the Malvern Hills, at the border of Worcestershire