Tidelands

Making the crossing from England to Wales via the Shoots Channel by kayak or SUP compresses a big adventure into a relatively short journey that can be done, potentially, on an evening after work. It also brings you headlong into the liminal, transitory, ever-changing and uniquely beautiful environment of Britain’s tidal estuaries, of which the Severn is the largest and wildest by a substantial order of magnitude. As Mark Rainsley points out in his Southwest England Sea Kayaking guidebook, whilst ‘characterised by mudflats and motorway bridges… an outwardly unappealing prospect, [the Bristol Channel] is actually one of the region’s most challenging paddles’.

There’s a deeper point about the relationship between the environment and the exploratory imagination here. Sometimes it’s in the most unlikely of arenas that the most compelling adventures can be found: the Bristol Channel is certainly one such arena. Fringed by the industrial outskirts of two large cities, this place remains a haven for wildlife as large container vessels approach or depart Portbury Docks, one of the UK’s major commercial shipping hubs. Despite – and in some ways because of – its rudimentary and occasionally post-apocalyptic aesthetic, the Bristol Channel is a place where you can explore the British coastline on its own terms.

This vast estuary is a magnificently wild place. You could say it’s the diametric opposite of a highly curated Instagram feed. It’s not obviously photogenic. There’s nobody about. And it is profoundly, exhilaratingly real.

Our trip out to Steep Holm and Flat Holm was completed in early summer 2020, as the UK was emerging from the strange isolation of the first Covid lockdown. International travel was all but impossible; the government’s revised guidance was to ‘stay local’. If our island-hopping trip between England and Wales was an imaginative interpretation of that advice, so be it.

I pieced together various sections of the English and Welsh coasts of the Bristol Channel during various trips, spread over several years, and I’ve now travelled the entire length of the Severn Estuary and the Bristol Channel by SUP, from the upper limit at Gloucester to the Exmoor coast where the estuary meets the Celtic Sea. The more time I’ve spent on and around these waters, the more I’ve become intrigued by them, and the more I’ve come to respect their wildness. At dead low spring tide, for example, there’s nine miles of treacherous mud between Burnham-on-Sea and the sea itself. Nine miles! 

The Bristol Channel even creates its own weather through various wind acceleration zones. During spells of high pressure, it often generates strong north-easterlies when there’s barely a few knots of wind inland; during cyclonic periods, the Exmoor coast accelerates the prevailing wind coming in from the Atlantic, often producing powerful westerly and northwesterly airstreams. Because of its status as one of the most navigationally complicated and dangerous shipping lanes on Earth, this estuary even gave rise to its own unique design of sailing boat, the ‘Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter’. Developed locally by master boatbuilders during the nineteenth century to escort pilots quickly to waiting ships, the boat’s combination of speed, manoeuvrability, seaworthiness and ease of handling (it could be sailed by just two people) has been described as ‘the best sailing boat design ever’ by maritime experts. It had to be that good, because of where it was used.

Unexpected stuff always happens out here. The late September light refracting  in white and gold over the Severn bridges as we approached from the north on the powerful ebb current. Finding that magical landing-spot on an expanse of blue-grey sand the size of five football pitches in the middle of the Channel downstream of Lydney. The hard graft of battling a sudden Force 5 crosswind turning the massive bend at Frampton-on-Severn. Approaching the big rapid upstream of Newnham surrounded by floating tree-trunks like prone primeval monsters. Watching the strange mystery of the tide flowing in both directions at the same time under the Severn Bridge at Beachley. Standing awestruck by the primordial roar of the Severn Bore [a tidal wave that takes place at certain times of the year] as it moves upriver. And listening to the constant eerie sluice of the powerful current under the hull, a reminder of the natural energy of this highly-charged place.