Exploring the old ferry routes across the Severn Estuary

Legends of the Civil War are an important ingredient of the folklore of Gloucestershire. That may be because Parliament held Gloucester throughout the war despite the King’s domination of the west and capture of Bristol, the other Parliamentarian stronghold in the region. The steady presence of Sir Edward Massey’s garrison in Gloucester instigated various military and political complications in the Royalist hinterland. Not least of these, Parliament controlled the bridge over the Severn at Gloucester. That meant that Royalists needing to travel between Gloucestershire and South Wales had to use the ferries operating from Aust – the so-called Old Passage – and from Redwick – the New Passage. The Old Passage was the shorter route, to Beachley and thence Chepstow. It was called ‘Old’ because it had been running since Roman times. The New Passage was instigated by the formation of the New Passage Ferry Company in 1630. Quite a modern-sounding name for something set up 400 years ago! Its route ran to Portskewett in Monmouthshire.

Turnstile of the Old Passage ferry Image: Kirsty Hartsiotis There was always a rivalry between New Passage and Old Passage. Sometimes the fortunes of one rose above those of the other. Although both ferries have now been replaced by road bridges, and in New Passage’s case a railway tunnel, their rivalry continues in ghastly legends of the Civil War. In this regard, I’d say New Passage has the edge. The stories usually begin with Royalist Cavaliers trying to cross the estuary to contact King Charles’s supporters in Wales. Sometimes the King – or Prince Rupert – is said to have been one of the travellers. The legend from Old Passage is that a pair of Cavaliers sought passage across the Severn, but the ferryman took against them. Maybe his sympathies were for Parliament. Maybe they annoyed him with their airs of entitlement. Whatever the reason, he landed them on what, in the murky sea mist, appeared to be the foreshore the other side of the river but was in fact a sandbank surrounded by water.

The legend from New Passage is that the ferryman had Royalist sympathies; that, having transported some Cavaliers to Portskewett, he took his time coming back because he knew that a troop of Parliamentarian Ironsides were pursuing them. When the Ironsides ordered him to take them across, he tried to demur on account of the lateness of the hour and the rising fog. The Ironside captain drew his sword to compel him. The horses and men were taken aboard and, in the moonlight and thickening mist, the ferryman steered carefully through the offshore reefs til at last he disembarked the Parliamentarian troopers on what he said was the Welsh shore. Once the boat had pulled away into the foggy darkness, the Ironsides discovered that the ‘shore’ was in fact a reef. They stumbled about on the seaweed-slippery rocks, screaming for help, but no help was coming and the tide was turning.

The large expanse of reefs to the west of Redwick are known as the English Stones. When exposed at low tide, they extend across half the estuary’s width. At high tide, they’re completely covered with water. The tidal range there in the Severn Estuary is more than 50 feet, the second highest in the world after the Bay of Fundy in Canada. And the tide comes in fast and strong. Neither the Ironsides marooned on the English Stones nor the Cavaliers on the sandbank further north would have stood a chance. Men and horses alike were overwhelmed by the flood tide. The New Passage story told in living memory by the folk of Severn Beach is that 60 Parliamentarian troopers lost their lives.

Legend says that Oliver Cromwell shut down the New Passage ferry because of the drowning of his soldiers that night. In the eighteenth century, amidst a legal haggle about the rights to reopening the ferry, different stories came to light as to what had happened. There was evidence that King Charles had considered taking the New Passage in July 1644; that he had a ‘narrow escape’ when he was dissuaded from doing so and some of his Cavaliers crossed without him for the purpose of misleading the enemy; and that ‘the pursuers’ were drowned. A precise number of 12 Royalist soldiers were mentioned as having forced the ferryman to take them over at low tide.

In these uncertainties, these alternative stories, we may detect the fog of war, as Tolstoy evokes so brilliantly in his depiction of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace. How many people died? From which side? On which part of the estuary? Did these events happen at all? In this cluster of legends, there’s almost an interchangeability between soldiers of the two sides. One time I told the story of ‘The Royalist Ferryman’ in Gloucester, there was a shocked silence at the end. Then someone said, ‘That’s war,’ and I sensed in the group of listeners a shared understanding about that. It’s common enough for war to be glorified as something noble and manly. Common too, in the case of stories from long ago, to take a humorous grisly pleasure in gruesome events. But, of course, war is horrible. People do the most terrible things to each other for the sake of their side’s cause. Even worse, perhaps, in a civil war, when the combatants are people who’ve lived side by side as neighbours, and those who survive will have to do so again when the war is over.

Route down to the Old Passage ferry with the Severn Bridge that replaced it Image: Kirsty Hartsiotis Today, you can take a stroll along the Severn Way that runs behind the saltmarshes for the three miles between Old Passage and New Passage – that is, between the starts of the Severn Bridge and the Prince of Wales Bridge that, respectively, carry the M48 and M4 into Monmouthshire. From the viewpoint behind Severn View service station, when the tide is in, the river looks like a sea between the countries of England and Wales, albeit that the northward stretch of the western shore is still Gloucestershire. The last ferry ran from Old Passage on September 8, 1966, the day before the Severn Bridge opened. The heyday of New Passage was between the 1860s and the 1880s, when from the railhead here train passengers would transfer to the ferry to cross into Wales. With the coming of the railway tunnel in 1886 the New Passage ferry became redundant, though the New Passage Hotel that had serviced it lingered until the 1970s.

Last vestige of the New Passage ferry Image: Kirsty Hartsiotis A small inlet just north of today’s hamlet of New Passage is where I imagine the ferry disembarking on that fateful evening in the Civil War. From near here, at low tide, you can see the English Stones extending as a slimy, rocky expanse beneath the massive pillars of the Prince of Wales Bridge. In daytime you’ll hear only the roar of traffic on the M4, but come here on a misty moonlit night, when the traffic has died down, and perhaps you’ll hear ghostly echoes of the screams of horses and Parliamentarian soldiers as the Severn’s huge tide overwhelms them. Meanwhile, up near Aust, so they say, two spectral figures can by night be seen, a pair of Royalist Cavaliers desperately seeking a way back to shore through the reedbeds and mud as the water steadily rises up their limbs.

FURTHER READING: Anthony’s retelling of ‘The Royalist Ferryman’ appears in Gloucestershire Ghost Tales by Anthony Nanson and Kirsty Hartsiotis. This story will also appear in The Anthology of English Folk Tales Volume 2 from the History Press.

MAPS: OS Explorer 167 Thornbury, Dursley & Yate or OS Landranger 162 Gloucester & Forest of Dean.

Anthony Nanson is based in Stroud and available as a storyteller and speaker. His books include, among others, Gloucestershire Folk Tales and (with Kirsty Hartsiotis) Gloucestershire Ghost Tales and Gloucestershire Folk Tales for Children. He has a PhD on ecological storytelling and storywriting and runs the small press Awen Publications.