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By Root 317 0

by train on the same route. Yet neither of us had ever walked it, despite this stretch of the Severn from Worcester to Stourport being the riverside walk of your fantasies. It is stunning. Sometimes, the path snuck surreptitiously through dark little woods, over tree roots and stiles, at other times it shimmered into the distance as a green swathe through buttercup-filled meadows. Bluebells, anemones, campion and comfrey danced in our wake. Clouds of pink and white hawthorn blossom leaned down to meet us, and all the while, the flat beer-coloured river sidled quietly by. It was like walking through one of those sentimental Edwardian watercolours you see on the walls of pubs.

There were also copious hints of the world that appeared from the other side of the Great War, in the shape of the chalets and other nuggets of arcadia that littered the banks. These are everywhere along the Severn, much-needed boltholes for metal-bashing Midlanders, for whom the coast was an unimaginable distance away. Some had been craftily rebuilt into more permanent structures, many remained as basic and wooden as the day they were knocked up, only the addition of a satellite dish nodding to the modern world. Dinghies, picnic chairs, gnomes, flags and barbeques were squeezed on to rickety verandahs, while old cars rusted away alongside. The chalet sites, often strung like a cheap necklace along the riverbank, alternated with the more regimented atmosphere of the caravan parks, squadrons of big metal boxes lined up like tanks. Leathery pensioners in shorts and sandals nodded politely as we trotted past.

The workaday spirit of the Severn showed itself again, when the path veered away from the riverbank for a mile or so leading up to Thomas Telford’s bridge at Holt, half-way between Worcester and Stourport. I’d managed – and not for the first time – to misread the map, so we ended up having to scale gates and hurry through the middle of a busy quarry, past young workers picking asparagus in a dusty field, before being reunited with the official path and led right through the middle of a strange cluster of light industrial units: a caravan sales office, a catering company, an equine supplies set-up, a charity headquarters and who knows what else, all getting on with it in the quiet of the Worcestershire countryside. As an ex-pat Midlander, I always feel absurdly proud of these odd little industrial estates that you stumble across almost anywhere in the region. Queen Victoria famously demanded that the blinds be drawn as her train passed through the smouldering hubbub of the Black Country, but she didn’t know what she was missing. These numerous units, churning out widgets, sprockets, gizmos and thingummies galore, fascinate me, and I’m always glued to the window as the train trundles through any part of the West Midlands, full of ignorant appreciation of these hives of entrepreneurship by the line. People still making stuff! In this day and age! It seems little short of a miracle. That they’re probably manufacturing bits of weaponry for dodgy regimes is where I choose to draw my curtains.

One of the many blogs about the Thames Path that I read called it ‘a 180-mile pub crawl’. It’s a good point. Waterside boozers are some of the best of all, the presence of unhurried swans and weeping willows somehow hypnotising us into kicking back and having another round, and then perhaps – oh, go on – another one after that. No worries about breathalysers when you’re walking either. On the Severn Way with my dad, I’d purposely chosen our overnight stop for its proximity to a remote riverside pub that I’d loved in my early drinking days, but hadn’t been back to for 20 years. He’d never been at all, and I was nervous that it would have changed beyond recognition. It hadn’t, not in the slightest, and we had a wonderful evening in there, eating hearty stew and drinking well-earned pint after pint of Flowers IPA, while the pub’s peacocks crowed outside and the setting sun turned the river into pink fire.

The relaxing quality of paths by water is their strongest card,