Yesterday's ride started with making sandwiches at home. This was because we'd been warned we'd be stopping for lunch at a pub that does not do food. That makes a counter-intuitive choice for a lunch stop to my mind, but doubtless it had other attractions. It was raining heavily when I got to the start point but a couple of riders were already there. So was a group of roadies looking at the clouds and having a conversation which went "Cafe?" "Cafe!" They were still in the cafe when we left, cos we're hard. Or foolish.
It carried on raining, sometimes more heavily, sometimes less, all morning till just before we got to the pub, which turned out to be "The Pub". That's its name. I guess it's the only pub in the village, and it's not really in the village, it's at the end of a long narrow road on a point sticking out into the Severn Estuary with beautiful views of the mudflats – it was low tide – and across to the Forest. We trooped in, bought beer and crisps – I had a pint of Bob, which is nothing to do with bobb, and Jane, who is not that Jane, had a pickled egg, and just about everyone had a pint of Bob, which meant the landlady had to keep going in and out of the back room where there was a barrel which, for some reason, was not connected to the pump at the bar – and then we trooped out again and sat in the sunshine, hoping our wet kit would dry. Dave investigated a WW2 pill box. We ate our sandwiches. And the landlady came rushing out yelling at us, "No picnics! I do lunches! Ploughmans and pork pies!" We mumbled about the misinformative website and stopped eating. Later, Jane bought a pork pie, and we all rode off to the ships' graveyard to finish our sandwiches or pork pie.
The ships' graveyard is a place where old concrete canal barges have been deliberately stranded on the bank of the Severn at various times from the 1940s onwards, to shore up the bank and prevent it eroding through into the Sharpness Canal, which is only a few metres inland at that point. There are now labels identifying some of the boats – name, place and date of building, year of stranding – and some sculptures. And a bench, but it was wet where the concrete of the barges was dry, so we sat on the barges to finish our lunches.
Then down the tow path, stopping to look at the remains of the railway bridge (just the pivot tower really). We spotted something large and grey on a sandbank which could have been the remains of one of the barges which destroyed it on a foggy night in 1960 (about which there is some controversy, suggestions it could have been a put up job cos they wanted to get rid of the bridge anyway; I doubt if the family of the crew who died take kindly to this theory). Round the docks, carefully taking a perpendicular line over the railway tracks, and home via a cafe in Tortworth for more cake. A fun day but now I've got an ear/jaw infection. But that'll recover.
