River SevernAfon Hafren
The navigable middle Severn, running some forty-two miles from Stourport down through Worcester to Gloucester
The Severn is Britain’s longest river, rising in the Welsh mountains and reaching the sea in the Bristol Channel. The stretch mapped here is its middle, navigable section: about 42 miles from Stourport-on-Severn down through Worcester to Gloucester, managed today as a navigation by the Canal & River Trust.
It is a broad, natural river rather than a canal, and it behaves like one — wide, sometimes fast, and prone to flooding after heavy rain in Wales. Locks came late, built in the 1840s to give reliable depth, and there are only a handful of them on this reach, large and worked by resident lock-keepers rather than by boat crews. That scale, and the currents, make it a rather different proposition from the narrow canals that feed into it.
The Severn is the trunk that those canals were built to reach. The Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal joins at Stourport, the Worcester and Birmingham Canal at Diglis in Worcester, the River Avon at Tewkesbury, and at Gloucester the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal carries boats on down past the tidal river to the estuary. Between them lie Upton-upon-Severn and the cathedral cities, with moorings below the steps of Worcester Cathedral and among the old warehouses of Gloucester Docks.
There is a right of navigation above Stourport towards Welshpool, but traffic there ended around 1900 and the upper river is left to canoeists. Below Gloucester the Severn becomes tidal, with the strong flows and the famous bore that make it no place for casual boating.
