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Walking and Pop-up Open-air Museums

Purton and the River Severn Walking around Purton on the River Severn is almost literally rather than figuratively a pop-up experience. The biggest riverine boat-grave in Britain: old boats and barges rammed into the river bank to try and keep it stable. And there are the boats: rusting, mouldering, skeletal and cadaverous, beached in a liminal half-solid, half squelching aqueous mud-scape. There they lie, some staring out mutely at the rushing river. Others are slip-sliding away to oblivion. After our trip in the Bongo, we drove back along the A38 to find a spot for the night. Where better than Arlingham? We camped at Weston Farm, right next to field after field of orchards, and field after field of medieval ridge and furrow: an open-air pop-up of corrugated pasture, and sea-waves of...

Between the Lines

BETWEEN THE LINES BY RICHARD DRY          I grew up in the 1970s in Stonehouse, just off Oldends Lane on the edge of the Park Estate, smack-bang in the middle between two main railway lines. Looking north from my bedroom window, the Stroud to Gloucester line sat...

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Pride comes before a Fall

Pride comes before a Fall You know the shop in John Street with all the bottles and jars and bikes and signs outside, and all the vintage toy railway engines inside: all those toy trucks and carriages and level crossings and signals and oh so much more. The one by...

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Dirty Old Stroud by Richard Dry

DIRTY OLD STROUD Before Stroud had a by-pass – or a Waitrose – it had a scrapyard. The Salvage and Recovery yard stretched all the way from what is now Travis Perkins to the railway viaduct, filling the space between the Stroudwater Canal and the River Frome. The...

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