Day 38 Part 1 - I see ships

Four weeks ago Rouen surprised me when I found it was holding a 24-hour powerboat race on the weekend that I arrived. Gloucester followed suit on Day 38 by surprising me with its annual tall ships festival.

There wasn't a huge number of fully-rigged sailing ships, perhaps just five or six. But even at 10:30 the crowds around the docks were growing. I liked the steam dredger whose chain of buckets scraped and scratched so noisily that it looked like the whole mechanism was about to seize.

The smoke from a steam crane blew through the rigging of the ships tied up at the quay and it was possible to imagine how busy these docks would have been one hundred and fifty years ago.

I slipped away from the dock through a small path, turning into the "Glavum Way" footpath alongside the mud-brown Severn. It was hard to avoid comparisons with the Seine, which frankly makes the Severn look like a trickle. Even the Eure, the biggest tributary of the Seine that I crossed, puts the Severn in the shade.

The path led through those kinds of small land-locked urban spaces which can't be developed for lack of access. The concrete undersides of bridges and flyovers offered graffiti artists canvasses perfect, except for the lack of viewers.

Soon the path changed from grit and dust-covered concrete to a nettle-maze. I found the track along the riverbank, where the Glavum Way and Severn Way are one and the same. Nettles have never been far from me on this walk but those on the Severn Way could win awards at Chelsea.

I had to lift my hands high in the air periodically as the most overgrown parts of the path were armpit-deep in nettles. The freshest leaves pierced my walking trousers to leave my knees sore.

Blue dragonflies rose before me in their hundreds as I disturbed them. It looked like the height of the dragonfly mating season as all but a tenth of them were conjugally coupled, both in flight as well as on the nettle leaves.

I was suprised to meet two walkers coming the other way. Dave and Susan are walking the Glavum Way in stages, parking a car at either end of a day's walk. Susan was in shorts and asked hopefully what nettle forecast I could offer. I broke the bad news. There was a way off the path to the road but if she persevered I reckon it would be agonising.

(continues in Part Two)