'for a start I noticed how pink/red the soil/earth is.....'

' but most of all I realised how deep and wide the River Wye and how close the Forest of Dean is to the Severn'

Portrait of Gloucester by T A RYDER (who was a Fellow of the Gealogical Society of London)- gives a very detailed account of the make up of the FOD throughout thousands of years...

This is just a very small quote ...

'Towards the end of the Silurian Period, a series of great earth movements folded and faulted the rocks of the British area and much of what is now England and Wales became land during the succeeding Devonian Period. The open sea lay away to the south, its northern coastline running across what is now mid-Devon. Semi-desert conditions set in in our area; much of the Welsh borderland area was covered with salt-marsh coastal flats, almost deltaic, across which rivers wandered. These deposited great quantities of sandstones and marls, often highly ferruginous, so today, these deposits are reddish in colour, the so-called Old Red Sandstone. They form the outer hill rim of the Forest of Dean and they also fringe the Bristol Coalfield. They give rise to rich deep reddish soils, on which grow many of the fruit orchards of the eastern slopes of Dean Forest, in the Longhope, Blaisdon and Elton district. Fossils are few in these sandstone beds, but some of the very first fossil fish to be found in England were discovered in the Old Red Sandstone beds of Breakheart Hill between Longhope and Mitcheldean.

Carboniferous Limestone also outcrops around the Forest of Dean Coalfield where it forms the inner lip to the basin. It is well seen at Littledean Hill, Mitcheldean, and above Green Bottom, it also outcrops to the west of the Forest, and the Wye valley is cut in it. The limestone of the eastern part of the Forest is interesting because it contains iron ore. This gave rise to the iron-mining industry of the area which was so important in earlier times.....

Anyone who has looked at a map of Gloucestershire must have wondered why the Severn makes that great curve that is known as the Horseshoe Bend between Westbury and Newnham. The main reason is that the harder limestone bands of the Lower Lias, which outcrop in a ridge that runs from near Arlingham to Eastington, proved more resistant to the erosive power of the stream than the softer clays did, so the river flowed round the ridge rather than cut through it......'

There was, however, one more chapter in the geological history of the area. During Tertiary times a great earth-storm took place - we are living in the dying-out phase of that series of earth-movements that gave rise to the folded mountains of the Alps and Himalayas. Britain lay some distance to the north of the main regions of activitity, but its ripples made their effect felt in our area. The Bristol Channel came into being as a result of folding of the rocks; the separated coal-fields of South Wales, Dean Forest and Bristol were formed. Rivers established themselves in the Channel area. Slowly they drove their head-waters north along the strike lines of the Jurassic rocks, and gradually the Lower Severn Vale and the Cotswold scarp began to take their present form - the main topographical features of the district appeared by the end of the Tertiary times......'

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On the Blakeney photograph Section - there is a photograph of Evan DAVIS- (Fisherman - from Blakeney) with the Sturgeon he caught on the Severn) - Evan married my Grandfather's sister. -