Severn Way - day 9

Gloucester to Upper Framilode - Tuesday 6th August

The Severn takes a big loop to the west from Gloucester but after yesterday's experience of local path maintenance I walked on roads out of the city to Hempsted and the road end. The SW path from here was again a nightmare jungle and I took another alternative walking down the Gloucester and Sharpness canal ON A WELL FOUND towpath, then to Stonebeach by road. From here after a three hundred yard jungle thrash I was back on easy ground. That jungle could have been avoided by continuing on the road to Weir Green.

Walking for the rest of the day on the raised bank was easy and enjoyable with much improved weather. Once again I met nobody walking on the SW all day, but I did have two exciting encounters.

Entering a large field a herd of about ten young bullocks were already looking frisky. When they saw me they immediately registered their terror by running amok. They all scattered, desperate to escape, some leaping and breaking a fence into the next field, and one that just burst it's way through a barbed wire fence, who needs wire cutters, just get yourself a well trained young bullock. In the next field was a large herd of cows, perhaps forty. Terrorised by the young bullocks it was Way out West stuff with a full stampede all heading off into the distance of the very large field. Whether anybody headed them off at the pass I will never know. Next I saw the rather pretty young farmer's wife emerging from the farm, and I reckoned I was due for a telling off, but it turned out they were her neighbour's cows and she is fed up of them breaking bounds and upsetting her peaceful herd. She said I had done everything right as she watched me trying to be as unintimidating as possible by diverting my route and taking a wide berth, but all to no avail. We had some further pleasant chat and I was on my way.

Approaching a stile into a field entering Epney there were two large, thoroughbred racing type horses, and they like the bullocks were all frisky, must be something in the air. They wouldn't budge as I climbed the stile, but I shooed them off, and it was like the start of the Grand National. They set off galloping down the raised narrow banking, fence on the left and shrubbery on the right. They covered the two hundred yards to the next stile in seconds, and then turned coming straight back at me at full gallop - my god, the noise, power and size of these beasts was frightening. As I covered that two hundred yards the horses repeated their racecourse three times - was I glad to be over that next stile.

The Anchor Inn at Epney was not particularly welcoming and they charged me £3 for a pint of orange and lemonade - that is now a record.

Just the opposite another half kilometre down the road at The Ship Inn where I am now booked in with a good welcome and a spacious double room. This is becoming a real luxury trip with hotels and b and bs, and a bit expensive, but I think I've got to the age where I am less inclined to live the hard life, and the walking is hard enough with this knee which continues to bother in varying degrees all the time.

Tomorrow I will end up only about 6 kilometres from where I am now in a straight line, but I have to take in a 12 kilometre loop on the river.

All goes well: tech fully charged, clothes washed, sun shining, and I'm well fed and watered, looking forward to tomorrow.
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Retirement (not on a budget)

The cow pics in my last post were taken at Low Sizergh Barn Farm Shop not far from my abode. At LSBFS well-to-do, elderly middle class frequenters, whose main pleasure in life is reviewing overpriced quality shops and eatng places, can satiate their hunger for retail therapy by paying four times as much for chicken breast, or cauliflower than they would at Tesco.

This is the ultimate place for people-watching within the narrow band described above. As you mingle you are close enough to catch snatches of conversation between long married, expensively dressed couples:

 “shall we have the smoked salmon (from an obscure smokehouse in Inverkirksomethingorother run by the fourth generation of the McMurdysomethingorother clan), or the sea bass? (line caught off the coast of Greenland)

Even the ladies behind the counter seem as though they might have “come out” thirty years ago, and they are either so well groomed, or so well trained that their considered pleasantries can help assuage any guilty conscience one may have for having paid £4.50 for a lettuce that would have cost 70p at Tesco, where the sixteen year old checkout girl greets you with the automated:

  “do you want help with your packing?”

Upstairs there is  a posh café with a gallery looking down into the cow byres, suitably screened by glass to avoid any undesirable olfactory connection with agriculture. Here the cows are treated like guests at the Lord Mayors Banquet. The milking parlour is as clean as Ferrari’s production line, and the animals themselves have an aristocratic demeanour.  In summer the cows come in for milking. What a gift for our doting well-to-doers who bring their grandchildren to observe, and to be educated.


In winter the cows are housed in this, their version of a country house, on a free range basis with plenty of straw and fodder, and room to amble about and hobnob as though they were in the bar of a gentleman’s club (albeit, of course that they are ladies). There is a final piece de resistance - the cows have a huge water powered brush like one part of a car wash mounted on a pole and oscillating at bum height, and they queue up in turns to wash their bums - fascinating!