A gleaming adventure playground where smaller visitors can hurl themselves down a super-size coal chute. Gentle shire horses. An old-fashioned sweet shop… Blists Hill Victorian town, the open-air museum in Shropshire, easily captures my sons’ attention, but it’s a different exhibit that makes me pause. In a hangar-like space I spot the beefy black hull of the Spry. The only complete surviving Severn trow – these distinctive barges once shuttled stone, coal and iron downriver to Cardiff and Bristol, and in shallow waters were hauled back up with ropes. It’s a vivid reminder of what this stretch of the Severn might have looked like 150 years ago, when up to 70 boats a day worked this riverine route.
If the Spry has magicked me back to Victorian times, however, I am about to rewind much further. Before the Industrial Revolution – and, in many cases, long afterwards – local people crossed, and fished from, the river by coracle. These little round boats, traditionally made for just one person from foraged wood and a cow or bull hide, were used for everything from poaching to ferrying goods during floods. In a nod to this more rural heritage, Shropshire Raft Tours plans to start hiring out coracles on the river from Easter, and my boys and I are in Ironbridge to test them out.
