The River Severn

Walking about Stroud where I live, one's legs are made quite aware of the hills. And they are hills with real character and inclination! It's as if this landscape wants you to have that experience of going up in quite a strong way. Or if you are going down, then your visual experience again is changed and all the wiggling ridges that tuck the valleys in them close up around you. The feeling when you are on high on one of the escarpments is a spatially widening one. There is a distinct hilly promontory at the end of the ridge that is straddled by Randwick woods, with the old villages of Randwick, Ruscombe, and the modern sprawl of Cashes Green below. It is called Doverow Hill, though to my eyes it is more of a beacon than a plain hill. From Doverow you have a dynamic wrap-around view of the valley one side with the neighbouring ridges, and then the other side the plain of the Severn river stretching further to the Welsh Mountains. Its a view you can literally breath in, as though it were a living organism which it is of course, but today with modern industrial developments, and extensive tarmacking over of the landscape it makes the living aspect of the land much obscured.
From my Doverow beacon with a bracing air about my ears, the mirror-like sheen of the Severn winding away down on the plain towards Gloucester's gangling suburbs is the source of life on this plain. The Severn could be the Nile of Gloucestershire. Her waters have fed the fertile pastures of the wet plains before we were here in the numbers we now are. She opens to an estuary further on at Bristol, where another wetland plain begins: the Somerset levels. The Severn wherever you go wandering in these valleys up a ridge to get a perspective on the land, always manifests herself at the borders of seeing: a mirror-like curving serpent. She is mysterious and so very ubiquitous everywhere you go in the land!
The streams in the valley, for example the Fromebrook (which today is high with the rains and rushing at an exciting, pumping pace) wend their way to her mirroring waters to become part of her journey. In days long ago, it must have been easier to more clearly see the path of the valley streams dancing away. It is a difficult thing now to follow these beautiful streams without them disappearing under concrete! At least the Severn won't know such crude treatment.
Water is a vital part of the landscape, and the plains of the Severn are well populated and settled because the soil has been anciently nourished and formed by her mirror-like hand. Life thrives here because the tidal bosom of the river. This gift of the Severn must surely have been revered by our Celtic ancestors. What deity did they perceive in the river when the tidal Bore surged and pulsed up the river course, a rushing wave boiling forwards like horses!
Though I have not seen the phenomena known as the Bore myself, but I feel its appearance to our old ancestors must have been like the essence of the river showing itself. The fact Gloucester cathedral now stands near her, its golden spire like a ships mast is surely testimony to the continuation of an ancient site of worship that beheld the Severn as god or goddess.
For a time I was living closer to the Severn on the opposite side of the river from Stroud. I remember walking on particularly bright mornings and seeing the river glistening wonderfully, yet so still but yet so full of dancing speckles of light! It was the skin of an awesome fish imbued with all the beauty of the sun!
I think the Severn was the first river I had encountered in England that seemed so alive. Her stillness and her tidal blossoming imparted that aliveness to me. She was breathing it seemed. When I experienced the light on her waters she seemed to become the very embodiment of light, and this makes me ponder the first half of the name of 'Gloucester'. The 'Glou' element of  the name derives from old Celtic roots, and an equivalent of the word can be found in Welsh. It means to be bright, or shining.
It makes sense. Gloucester is founded on the banks of a river that when touched by the sunlight, becomes so bright and radiant it makes one stop and ones heart see's a threshold to a divine realm of lightness, sweetness, grace and eternity. No wonder there was a temple to the Celtic fisher deity Nodens at Lydney, perhaps there were many more sacred places, strung along the banks of a river that is the journey of life itself.

Here's a poem!

Severn drowned Sabrina

Streaming in out,
flotsam of fishing lures,
jettison of today,
car tyres drowned like Sabrina,
a shoal of drift things in the bore,
In the eels quicksilver tails,
flashing eyes in the depths,
we step down its mud banks, 
cold tidal lips,
reveal each of us a mantle,
flung out,
a yard of cloth,
bringing beauty,
breathing bright,
the banner of the Severn.

Robin Collins 2014