Along the Severn

We stayed for two nights, before and after our get-together, at the Valley Hotel, Ironbridge: you can walk down from the hotel terrace, through a beautifully maintained public park, and you come to the Severn. That's what we did on our first morning, and then we followed the river towards Ironbridge. It was hot and bright, and I was grateful for the shade of the tree-lined river banks, while it lasted: the Severn Gorge is heavily wooded, with occasional glimses of arches on the far side which we later learned were remnants of the Great Western Railway.

We passed the Antiques Emporium, and were lured into the marvel of Gothic brickwork which is the Ironbridge Gorge Museum. This advertises itself as the point where the Ironbridge Gorge meets the wider world: because it was built (in the reign of William IV) as a jetty to send goods off from the local industries, along the river to the wider world. It has been other things since, including a petrol station, but what it has been, more than anything else, is flooded. By definition, it is right down at the water's edge, where it gets the brunt of any flooding which is happening: which used to be every thirty years or so, then more recently every year, and at present several times a year. It underwent a major renovation, then flooded again, and they renovated again to as flood-proof a standard as they could (all the electrics are high up the walls) and the current exhibition is pretty much a plea for suggestions: how can we best use this irresistible building? That evening I tried to describe this to another member of the party, and was disconcerted that she was grateful for the warning not to bother visiting: we had both liked it very much. A highlight was a display of slides of past floods, including the flooded petrol station, and local coracle-maker Harry Rogers paddling his coracle through the flooded streets. Naturally I went straight to the desk and demanded postcards of this image, and natually they didn't have any (they used to, apparently, but had sold them all and not reprinted). An image search provides plenty of images of members of the Rogers family out and about in coracles (including a link to a page of the Shropshire Star which purports to show the image I was looking for, but founders under the weight of advertising. So it goes...).

Once we had left the museum, the iron bridge came into sight almost immediately. We admired it, and walked a bit closer to admire it some more, and photographed it, and went through the tunnel so that we could photograph it looking the other way. Then we crossed the bridge, and went to the Tollhouse museum (where our fellow visitors were three - I assume - Buddhist monks in saffron robes), and crossed the bridge back again. Have a photo from the middle of the bridge:

There's a pretty square, with a bookshop (of the frustrating kind, which has some lovely books, all of which I already have) and a teddy bear shop (with an impressive window display of Moomins) and a tea shop, outside which we sat under a shady umbrella and ate ploughman's lunches (someone had grated all the cheddar, which was odd but not a deal-breaker). Over lunch we agreed that I would be prepared to walk a little further, if I wasn't required to walk all the wat back. On this basis, we continued to the Bedlam blast furnace: massive heaps of masonry huddled into the hillside, historically important (one of the sites where the iron for the bridge may have been cast), artistically significant (believed to be the subject of this painting), surrounded by railings and parked cars, which was frustrating.

We backtracked to a little park with a bench where I waited in the shade, and read my guidebook about Ironbridge, while durham_rambler returned to the hotel and collected the car. Back at the hotel, an hour's sleep, a shower and a change of clothes, and I was ready to go and be sociable. Among the many things we talked about, the five couples who made up the party compared notes on how we had all spent the day, and I was relieved to discover that I did not at all regret not having gone to the spectacular Vctorian town. I was entirely satisfied with my fragmentary visits to the Gorge,

This morning, though, we had time to visit one substantial museum before moving on to Ludlow, and we opted for the Jackfield Tile Museum. It deserves a post of its own, with many pictures; it really is bigger on the inside, and by the time our visit had returned us to our starting point, I didn't have the energy to visit either of the craft galleries nearby. We found a pub - actually, one that was mentioned in the museum - and after a relaxing lunch, it was an hour's drive to Ludlow for the next episode of our trip.