Tag: harbour

An Afternoon At The Seaside – Saundersfoot

An Afternoon At The Seaside: Last week I was staying with friends in a holiday cottage in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, and on Sunday 1st September after a late lunch we drove the roughly seven miles down to the coast at Saundersfoot.

An Afternoon At The Seaside

Saundersfoot is a small seaside resort a few miles from its much larger neighbour Tenby but despite its size seems to have everything needed for a day at the seaside, including something that seems rare these days, sewage-free bathing, with a good sandy beach that gets cleaned by every high tide. But none of us swam there.

An Afternoon At The Seaside

There were at least five coal mines in the area in the nineteenth century, producing some of the finest quality anthracite, with tramways bringing it down to the beach for shipping out. In 1829 Parliament gave permission to the Saundersfoot Railway and Harbour Company for the building of a harbour to export coal and other local goods, bringing in iron ore to produce pig iron.

An Afternoon At The Seaside

The mines have long closed but the harbour is still there, now with private moorings, and still used by a few fishermen and for pleasure trips around the bay, as well as the sailing club.

An Afternoon At The Seaside

Saundersfoot is also almost on the railway, with a station over a mile to the north bearing its name, but with so few trains to be almost useless. And in winter the trains are often replaced by buses.

We were able to park on the seafront, with just a footpath between us an the beach and decided to walk the short distance to the harbour.

We walked along the pier to the mouth of the harbour, then back to the town where we found a shop selling proper ice cream in a number of interesting flavours.

Then we walked along the other side of the harbour to the harbour mouth. There is another smaller beach to the south of the harbour.

Back in town (or rather large village) we followed the map on the detailed leaflet we had on Saundersfoot to look at its three nineteenth century chapels. The Congregational one is now converted to residential use, the Wesley Methodist still in business and the Baptist had a small notice announcing a temporary closure and inviting people to instead worship with the Methodists.

On our way into the village we had passed the parish church around three-quarters of a mile from the beach but didn’t stop to look at this Grade II* building with a medieval tower.

When we returned to the beach and lent on the promenade railings to look at the beach, now almost all covered by the sea. I took a few last pictures, though it’s now probably regarded as a crime to photograph people – particularly children – enjoying themselves at the seaside.

The previous day we had shared a rail replacement taxi from Carmarthen with a woman who was travelling to visit her daughter in Kilgetty, the next village to Saundersfoot and probably the only person apart from our group in Pembrokeshire that we knew. We found her looking out over the sea from same railing as us and had a short conversation.

More pictures from Saundersfoot.

Industrial Archaelogy 1988

Some photographs from a GLIAS (Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society) coach trip to Gloucestershire in 1988. For most of the time it rained, rather restricting my photography.

Lock gates, Lydney Harbour, 1988 88-7a-62-positive_2400

Lydney Harbour was built in 1810-3 to carry iron ore and coal from the Forest of Dean. These were brought to the harbour by a tramway built in 1809. Coal continued to be shipped from here until 1960 and the harbour only closed in 1977. It was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1985 and later reopened for leisure use More recently there have been some restoration work and a £2.1m Destination Lydney Harbour project began in June 2020 to develop the area for recreation and tourism. An outer Sea gate from the River Severn leads into a Tidal basin, then a lock connects to the dock and Lydney canal. The upper lock gate is a double gate to protect against high tides in the estuary.

The harbour is the mouth of the River Lyd, and a canal leads a mile inland to Lydney. The swing bridge across the canal between the upper and lower parts of the dock was Grade II listed in 1988. Apparently timber was still carried in barges along the canal until around 1980.

Cookson Terrace, Harbour Rd, Lydney, 1988 88-7a-43-positive_2400

Cookson Terrace on Harbour Rd is a row of cottages built in 1858 as a hotel and housing by the Severn and Wye Railway and Canal Company, Grade II listed in 1988.

Blast furnace, Gunns Mills, Flaxley, Forest of Dean, 1988 88-7b-63-positive_2400

Gunns Mills, Flaxley, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire is a Grade II* Listed Building and a Scheduled Ancient Monument, being probably the oldest surviving blast furnace in the country, dating to 1683. The mill was named after William Gunne who owned an earlier mill on the site. A charcoal blast furnace built here in 1629 was demolished by Parliament in 1650. The furnace was rebuilt in 1683 but went out of use in 1743 when this became a paper mill which closed in 1879, after which some buildings on the site were used as farm buildings.

Gloucester Docks, 1988 88-7b-55-positive_2400

The main site for our visit was Gloucester Docks, a remarkable collection of fifteen Victorian dock buildings around the main basin, built in 1827 as the terminus of the ship canal from Sharpness, and the Barge Arm, provided at the same time to stop barges cluttering up the dock. A new dock, the Victoria Dock, was added in 1847 and further warehouses were added to deal with the increased foreign imports after the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws.

As the size of vessels increased a new dock was built at Sharpness; larger vessels were unloaded there, with some goods being carried by barges up the canal, while smaller ships continued to use the canal. The docks remained busy until the 1960s but commercial traffic had largely disappeared by the 1980s. Since then the dock has become of popular leisure and residential area both for boaters and tourists.

Old Sharpness Canal entrance, 1988 88-7b-24-positive_2400

The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal was for some years the broadest and deepest canal in the world, intended to be 18ft deep and 86.5ft wide. Authorised in 1793, building was held up by financial difficulties and it was only completed in 1827. 16.3 miles long, it avoided a large loop in the River Severn with a dangerous bend. By 1905 traffic along it had reached 1 million tons a year. Our coach took us for a brief visit to the Old Sharpness Canal entrance, opened in 1827 but no longer in use, before going to Sharpness Dock, opened in 1874 to allow larger ships which could not use the canal to dock. This is still a working dock and most of the older buildings have been replaced by more modern structures.

Sharpness Docks, 1988 88-7c-51-positive_2400

I don’t actually remember much of that visit, but the photographs remain, around a hundred of them, though I’ve only included around 30 in the album. I do remember our coach back to London being held up on the motorway and arriving back in central London hours later than planned, having to run across Waterloo station to just jump on the last train home, minutes before midnight.

More pictures from the trip in a Flickr Album.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.