2012: Friday walks 2

Posted: January 14, 2012 | Author: Ronnie Hughes | Filed under: Breast cancer, Guest posts, Natural world | Tags:Being Sarah, life, environment, walking |Leave a comment »

Upstream in the Dee Estuary, looking across the marshlands to Wales

Ronnie’s second report on our Friday ritual, out walking.

This week we tried a new walk. By the Dee Estuary, like last week, but this time several miles further away from the sea, up by the silted up swamplands around Neston. And so, unusually for us, we took a map and a guidebook. We do this the first time on any walk, just to get generally familiar, get a sense of the place, in fact. But on our way round, we notice the points where, next time we will leave the recommended paths and begin to improvise, as we of course prefer.

Nevertheless, this was a magnificent walk, on a glorious, crisp, blue day. At first along ancient lanes and footpaths that have never made it into roads, across farm fields, and gradually down to what used to be the shore. But the River Dee began seriously silting up in the thirteenth century, and the shore of the river is now two miles away from where it used to be. Over towards the Welsh side of the estuary.

So this part of the shoreline is a story of hundreds of years of building new quays in new ports, further and further downstream from the original port of Chester, trying forlornly to cope with the silting up of their river. They used to mine for coal here too, in leaking, dangerous coal shafts stretching out for miles under the river. Some shafts so tiny only children could fit down them. And we had our lunch on what’s left of the sandstone quay, from where the poor quality coal they scratched a bare living from, would be exported across to Ireland.

Before turning away from the Estuary, we also found what’s left of the ‘New Quay’. Built in 1550, but never successful, and falling into ruins from 100 years later. We love walking through history, travelling through time, finding the stories.

And we loved this new walk. So new it hasn’t even got an arty, poetic name yet. But it did get an immediate, spontaneous nine out of ten from both of us (yes, we ‘score’ walks). So we’ll definitely be back.