The road to Lydney Dock

Like a jagged tooth in a cavernous mouth, Lydney Dock juts out into the River Severn, defying both the currents that sweep the estuary and the march of time.

 

In the early nineteenth century, the grandly named Severn and Wye Valley Railway and Canal Company built a horse drawn tramway and canal basin for transporting coal and iron to wharves at Lydney. Mooring was needed for the ships that were to export the goods, and so the dock was built. At first, Lydney moved with the times. The tramway was converted to a railway, broad gauge and then standard gauge, but competition arrived in the shape of the Severn Railway Bridge, and rival docks across the estuary at Sharpness. Closure of the local coal mines followed and, although business at the dock limped on in one form or another, the port finally closed in 1976. Or so it seemed at the time. The patient has now been revived, if not to its former glory. Within the last ten years, the port has been re-opened as a yachting marina.

 

A prominent feature of the dock is its oil lamp, complete with lamp lighter’s ladder. Originally the lamp was extinguished at midnight but, after two people had fallen into the river and drowned, it was agreed that it should remain lit throughout the night. A poignant reminder of even greater tragedy is a giant boulder positioned on the dock. It is a memorial to the victims of an accident in 1960 when a pair of oil barges hit a pier of the Severn Railway Bridge, bringing down two of the girders.

 

I visited the dock yesterday. It was a bright sunny day, but haze misted the horizon, masking the distant road bridge. Sharpness Docks and a decommissioned power plant were visible across the estuary, and around the foot of the dock the ebb tide had revealed banks of rippling sand. Two boys were chasing each other around the edge of the canal basin, stumbling perilously close to the edge. A warning notice, demanding that children should be supervised by an adult, was studiously (or perhaps un-studiously) ignored by their parents. Eventually the boys skipped away to play elsewhere. For today, another tragedy had been avoided.