I am staying in a pub on Frampton village green which apparently is the largest village green in the country. It has a cricket pitch and three ponds in the middle and some very nice houses round the edge. Last night, for a bit of a change, I had a walk down to the far end of the green for a pint in a nice local pub and then walked back again, I am not sure I can count those 2 miles in my grand total for the trip as it was not really necessary.
Today’s walk was a 9 mile circuit round a bow in the river, an easy day and no heavy rucksack to carry. I decided to do something quite revolutionary – I walked upstream rather than down, not that it makes much difference on a tidal stretch of the river.
As you can see in the pictures the river is wide but full of sandbanks and rocks at low tide, hence the building of the canal to bypass this bit of the river. Tomorrows walk follows the canal towpath for the whole day so should be nice and flat.
It is supposedly a bird lovers paradise with lots of waders and water birds but the only birds I saw today were a couple of kestrels and a pigeon.
As promised in yesterdays blog today’s bit of useless information covers lampreys.
Lampreys are another Severn oddity which I always assumed were just another name for elvers, I was wrong, they look like eels but are totally unrelated and are more closely related to sharks.
They range in size from 5 to 20 inches long and for much of their lives are parasites, biting onto bigger fish and sucking their flesh for food. They don’t have exciting holidays near Florida like elvers, they just migrate into the estuary and coastal waters around Britain.
There used to be plenty in the Severn and it was a tradition that Gloucester would bake a lamprey pie for the sovereign on special occasions although it is not recorded whether the Queen actually ate the pies baked for her on the jubilee or the day she became the longest serving monarch. She will get another one this year but apparently there are so few lampreys in the Severn they will be imported from Canada.
A weakness for the fish is thought to have proved fatal for King Henry I, who in 1135 died of food poisoning after eating 'a surfeit of lampreys', while Samuel Pepys' diaries speak of the their popularity among 'medieval epicures'.
I have not eaten elvers or lampreys so far but my scallops last night were particularly good, I did not like to ask where they came from.
Tomorrow I walk down the canal to Sharpness and then a few miles further on to Berkeley where I am staying the night. I then have to decide if I should do the rest of the walk, 17 miles, in one day or two. The big issue is there are no nice places to stay mid way, the nearest is the Travel Lodge at the Severn Bridge Services - I think I might walk the 17 miles.