A journey on the Severn

At high tide on the Severn Estuary, we set off on a voyage that navigates one of the highest and most challenging tides in the world. On an early Novembers’ morning Captain Eric Witheridge, artist Steve Geliot and I (Eleanor) left Lydney Harbour to travel under the Severn bridges, along the North Somerset coast and finishing our exhilarating seven hour journey in South Wales. 

This journey was the starting point for my thinking around our contemporary and historic connection to place and our changing landscapes.  

This historically important trade route has been navigated throughout history, before railways and the industrial revolution changed our landscape forever.

8am, leaving Lydney Harbour.

Photograph Eleanor Goulding

Sailors worked with the cyclical rhythm of the tides navigating these hugely challenging routes, in all weathers, light and dark, with astonishing skill.

Photograph by Eleanor Goulding

Arriving into Cardiff Barage

Photograph by Steve Geliot

Experiencing this historic route allowed me to see a familiar landscape become unfamiliar and unexpected, seeing it instead through deep water channels, wind directions and navigational charts.

Photograph Eleanor Goulding

This journey was the starting point for my research and thinking around our contemporary and historic connection to place and our changing landscapes.

For a period of two weeks during the Somerset Art Works festival I will be adding to an online log book of work created in response to these themes.

This has been supported, with thanks, by the Somerset Art Works bursary programme.