Country Life
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Fiona Reynolds recounts her daily exercise, and rejoices in a walk along the local riverbanks.
The Severn flows slowly to the sea. Britain’s longest river, it meanders and dallies, finally discharging its voluminous contents into the Bristol Channel 220 miles from its source. Famous for its tidal bore, which surges upriver when the moon is full or new, becoming dramatic and a thrill for surfers as the channel narrows and swings, the Severn shapes some of England’s most beautiful counties, but nowhere is it more mysterious than in its lower reaches.
Here, its most spectacular meander almost encircles the little village of Arlingham in Gloucestershire. Bounded by land only on its eastern side, this captured patch was, for centuries, important as a crossing-point of the Severn, by ferry from Arlingham to Newnham, although it was ‘made unwholesome by the copious humid exhalations from the river’, according to Samuel Rudder’s 1779