Dudbridge to Dublin?
In those far-off early days before the opening of the Severn Tunnel, when the main line to South Wales ran through Gloucester, and when the 1801 Act of Union incorporating Ireland into the United Kingdom was less than fifty years old, and just as the Great Hunger – the Irish Potato Famine – began its murderous depredations, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the GWR began to dream of a South Wales and South of Ireland Railway.
The projected line would run from Stonehouse to reach Fretherne on the eastern banks of the River Severn, thence to Awre on the opposite bank via mile-long bridge over the rushing turbid waters of the Severn and its treacherous currents and mudbanks. A bridge over the River Severn close to where the Severn Bore can rush at its speediest downstream on a river with the second-highest tidal range in the world.
In the event, the Admiralty scuppered that scheme and that was the end of that. What a beautiful train ride that would have been! The Forest of Dean prominent as you journeyed west across that bridge and the Cotswolds in all their glory as you returned eastwards. But you can still take a poetic ride along the river south from Gloucester towards Newport (stops at Lydney and Chepstow to explore a preserved steam railway and a castle).
As you gaze out from your carriage window, musing on that so-close riverscape, looking east towards Framilode (just by Fretherne), you might like to recite these words of Ivor Gurney:
‘When I saw Framilode first she was a blowy
Severn tided place under azure sky.
Able to take care of herself, less girl than boy.
…With the never forgotten beauty of the Frome
One evening when elver-lights made the river like a stall-road to see.’
(The River Frome is the river that wends its way through Stroud and on to the River Severn.)
Ivor Gurney’s friend F.W. Harvey (they boated together on the river) was born at Minsterworth (not too far from the line); here are a few lines from his poem Spring 1924 about Broadoak (just by the river and right on the line):
‘Spring came by water to Broadoak this year,
I saw her clear.
Though on the earth a sprinkling
Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling
Bright curve of the Severn River
Was of her gospel first giver …’
And a few more lines from Harvey:
‘O you dear heights of blue no ploughman tills,
O valleys where the curling mist upstreams
Over fields of trembling daffodils,
And you old dusty little water-mills …’
It’s a beautiful line to South Wales from Gloucester. Site-seeing from a carriage window.