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Gloucester is full of areas with fascinating history and Severnprint will be producing a series of articles about Gloucester and the area. This is the first. Get a copy of our Severnprint "Hot of the Press" by just sending me an email and I'll post one to you.
The Purton Hulks
There are few objects with less soul than a Second World War concrete barge. It was an unloved piece of practical transport that was as anonymous as the muddy tidal waters of the River Severn it traversed. And when it became redundant it should have, to use an apposite cliché, sunk without trace.
And yet on a narrow swathe of scrubland running between the Severn’s Waveridge Sands and the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal there is now an embossed plaque celebrating the beached hull of FCB75, technically known as a Ferrous Concrete Barge.
This might at first seem as peculiar as honouring a redundant articulated lorry trailer or canonizing a rotting holiday caravan. But in fact the barge and its neighbouring brethren belong to an extraordinary maritime monument of vessels; a collection of modern megaliths known locally as the `Purton Hulks’.
At low water in the winter drizzle these forgotten lighters assume the guise of a contemporary art installation. Bleached ribs from discarded Severn Trows poke from the silt. Derelict concrete grain barges lie abandoned, unscathed by wind or water while the hulls of many of the steel schooners scuppered in this landlubber’s grave are now just outlines in the scrub grass with only an occasional deck house, winch and row of rusting iron nails visible.
"What we have here is the largest boat cemetry in maritime Britain,” said local marine historian Paul Barnett who lives in Gloucester. “It is the final resting place of eighty-one vessels of steel, timber and concrete constructions.”
It was a hundred years ago this year that the first of these floating blockades was deliberately run aground on a half-mile foreshore between Purton and Sharpness. It was the simple solution to a massive landslip in the winter of 1906 when a fierce storm all but destroyed the high ground separating the river and the canal. Local traders who relied on the canal for transport were desperate to ensure such a disaster could never happen again and the canal company’s chief engineer, A J Cullis, came up with idea of plugging the breech with a flotilla of unwanted working boats.
Over the next fifty-six years vessels were towed at speed from the far bank of the river shortly before the onset of high tide and then released so that they thundered into the broken bank. As the tide fell back a hole was smashed into the ship’s side to allow in water and, over time mud, silt and sand. The first barge believed to be beached in 1909 was The `Envoy’ and part of her wooden stern is still clearly visible today. The last to be run aground, in 1965, was `FCB75’.
Unfortuntately this unique repository of marine history is vanishing as vandalism destroys it and the tide begins to claim back its own. Paul Barnett, who first visited the site as a teenager in 1976, has watched the remains disappear as remorselessly as he has researched every vessel (he is now confident he can identify seventy-seven boats). All that is left, for example, of the `Katherine Ellen’, seized by the Royal Navy after running guns to the IRA in 1921, is the rusty tube of her bilge pump. Others, such as the `Harriett’, a Kennet barge built in Pewsey in 1905, have fared a bit better - her name is still just about visible on the stern.
“Because the vessels were abandoned with no money changing hands they belonged to no-one,” said Barnett, who has spent the past eleven years trying to record, locate and identify as many of the barges as possible. “At first locals used them as a free supply of timber for their fires. Then others came and salvaged the semi-precious metals like the phosphor bronze pins that held them together.”
Meanwhile this unprotected maritime oddity, which falls between protection under the Wreck Act and protection as a scheduled monument, has in the last few years become a magnet for naval historians, marine archaeologists and photographers.
Last year the recently formed `Friends of Purton’ was presented with an acclaimed Certificate of Merit for its campaign to save the unique collection. It has organised for twenty-two of the boats, including `FCB75’, to have individual plaques placed by them, many of them paid for by those who knew the men who worked on them. The `Ada’, for example, a barge build in 1869 and beached in 1956 has a plaque dedicated to `the memory of Adrian Gordon, a decendant of Captain James Herbert’. There was a bouquet of pink flowers tied to one of its steel ribs on the day that I visited.
And it was while I was standing by The `Ada’ that the mournful toot of the horn from the Gloucester to Chepstow train on the other side of the river reverberated across the water. It added, I thought, an appropriate soundtrack to what is, despite the brutish concrete evidence in front of me, a most soulful place.
