South of Gloucester, along the banks of the river Severn lies the small village of Purton, home to a rather unique graveyard. At Purton, the Gloucester and Sharpness canal runs parallel to the river with only a small embankment separating the two. Early in the twentieth century, it became apparent that the narrow embankment was threatened with a breach resulting from tidal erosion along the river bank. The solution was to allow decommissioned vessels and barges to be beached and allowed to fill with silt.
The vessels, deposited between 1909 and 1965, created the necessary barrier for the protection of the canal and have now become known as the Purton Hulks or the Purton Ship Graveyard. Some ships are quite visible, others reveal a bow proudly emerging from the soil, and for some there only remains a rudder and post. Of the 26 ships beached, the majority are completely covered, and there are sunken indentations in the earth which trace the outline of the buried hull. Like gravestones, there are location placards listing the vessels entombed below.
Between Gloucester and Purton we happened upon the Uley Long Barrow, also known locally as Hetty Pegler’s Tump. The barrow is actually a neolithic burial mound, a fairly common feature in Britain and often found in the middle of a field. This tumulus had been excavated and the very small entrance was exposed, although on this rainy day I had no interest in burrowing into the barrow on my belly in the mud. In fact, by the time we had reached the mound it was raining buckets. This, I thought, was a great opportunity to test out the North Face branded raincoat I had purchased while in Vietnam.
I should have known that the ridiculously low purchase price was too good to be true. By the time we returned to the car I was soaked to the bone!
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