Jane’s Walk 2024 – Day 13

We have a good night, after a lovely supper party.  We drive back to the estuary, which is still a bit hazy, but at least it’s dry.

We meet a twitcher, who is very excited as he has seen two Osprey this morning. They are rare in this area, although he has seen them on other occasions.

The tide is coming in, so the sand banks are disappearing, so he tells us he is off home. The embankment continues to make walking easy. We negotiate around the comparatively new Oldbury Nuclear Power Plant which replaced the old one we passed yesterday. It is a vast place and feels slightly sinister as we walk alongside high-security fences with warning signs about being a top security facility, including the prohibition of flying drones near the site. There appears to be no one around.

Further along the path we have to take a detour inland around a sailing club full of sailing boats of all sizes. Our prescribed path should take us into the village of Pullens Green and back down the other side. However we are told by a local couple that we can cross over through the Sluice Gate making quite a considerable short cut. Richard picks us up a couple of miles further on as there is nowhere for lunch nearby.

Back after lunch, we are beginning to approach the old Severn Bridge crossing over to Wales. The map indicates we can get around the bridge by keeping to the shoreline and then going over a footbridge. However, the shoreline is clearly not navigable at high tide, and there is a steep cliff on our left, so we retrace our steps, finding the way up an extremely steep hill. There are no signs at the bottom that this is the right route so we are very pleased to find the gate at the top.

We walk over the motorway and have to re-route ourselves through the village of Old Passage as we are reluctant to walk down the very busy A403 with a very narrow footpath to re-join our path. As it turns out, this was a very good decision as that part of the footpath had been closed.

Back on to the embankment we make good progress and leave the river to meet up with Richard at Northwick. This is where we say goodbye to the River Severn as we take a rather different end route tomorrow.