Europe > United Kingdom > Cotswolds > Gloucestershire > Canoeing and kayaking > Articles > Going with the Flow

No 12

United Kingdom,Cirencester

"A Grade II listed townhouse, now housing a beautiful boutique hotel in the Cotswolds. Clean and contemporay, it's the ideal weekend retreat from the city, convenientl...

From GBP 80.00 Read review

Cotswold House Hotel

United Kingdom,Chipping Campden

"This polished boutique hotel overlooks the main market square in Chipping Camden - its picture-perfect Cotswolds. It's even attracted celebrities, with Chris Martin a...

From GBP 205.00 Read review

Cowley Manor

United Kingdom,Cheltenham

"From the outside, a typical Cotswolds manor house - but inside this boutique hotel is funky and flamboyant. Its a firm favourite during the Cheltenham Literature Fest...

From GBP 245.00 Read review

The first time I saw the impressive stretch of the River Wye that passes though Symonds Yat was on a glorious autumn morning when mist hung over the river, the sun rose above russet-leaved trees on the steep river banks and all hell was being let loose as a group of school kids floated chaotically down the river in aluminium Canadian canoes.

Screams and peals of laughter mixed with the hollow clang of paddles against the side of the canoes, and the few fishermen sitting on the bank to practise their thrill-a minute hobby looked less than happy - miserable gits at the best of time (as I was soon to discover), noise and general high spirits in their vicinity were not the best recipe for bringing out the best in them.

But to hell with the fishermen. I was researching a guide to the area (so tedious and uninspiring was the eventual outcome from the publisher that I have no intention of naming it here) and it occurred to me that since canoeing was such as intrinsic part of life around Symonds Yat for many visitors I really should give it a try myself - after all, you can hardly write with authority on a subject unless you’ve tried it yourself.

And if a bunch of school kids could do it, I was bloody sure I could - a thought I was to reflect upon somewhat ruefully a few days later.

So, the following weekend, in partnership with fellow writer, traveller and general ne’er do well Rob Penn and his girlfriend Vicky we hired ourselves a canoe and, from a spot just upstream of Symonds Yat, launched into the brown waters of the Wye to float and paddle the few miles downstream to Monmouth. It was to be the mildest of adventures though - drifting down a feeble British river was not likely to get the juices flowing much as far as we were concerned. This was not exactly ‘Deliverance’ country, after all.

That said, launching the damned things was a little tricky - balance and poise are useful when scrambling in and out of a canoe as they tend to, well, rock a bit, and it would be easy to imagine losing you balance and toppling over the side. Not likely to happen to us though…

With three people in the vessel and two paddles this meant one brave mariner was left with little more to do than look at the river bank and twiddle their thumbs, and even for the paddlers the only real challenge was trying to keep the boat going in a straight line - inevitably one individual has a more powerful stroke than the other, and as each person paddles on opposite sides of the boat this means that it tends to veer to port or starboard depending on which side the strongest paddler is stroking.

The rear paddler’s job therefore is to steer as well as paddle. This means the rear paddler has the most interesting time. Actually, I’m making all this sound rather more dull than it is. On more turbulent waters I have no doubt that canoeing is an exciting challenge, and on quieter waters such as those we were navigating the trick is to relax and enjoy the scenery - you get a far different perspective of the river when floating upon it than you do from the riverbank, and being such a quiet mode of transport it’s possible to get very close to aquatic wildlife such as swans, ducks and other water fowl.

And things did eventually liven up as we came around one of the large bends in the river to see - joy! - the 15th century Old Ferrie Inn beckoning us from the riverside hamlet of Symonds Yat West. If, as we had decided, we were going to treat our canoeing as more ‘deliver unto’ than ‘deliverance’ it seemed that now was the time to deliver unto ourselves a pint of ale.

So we skilfully manoeuvred ourselves up to the jetty beside the pub (disturbing - surprise, surprise - a fisherman, although this one didn’t growl too much) and rather less skilfully wobbled our way out of our wildly bucking craft. One pint later - and I emphasise the one, for river travel and beer don’t mix - we wobbled our way back into the canoe and continued down river, briefly being told to shift ourselves to the left bank by the miserable skipper of a ‘pleasure boat’ taking pensioners and the feeble minded on a no-thrills-guaranteed trip upriver.

And lo, it came to pass that as we rounded the next bend in the river we came across yet another pub on the banks of the busy little hamlet of Symonds Yat East. Indeed, The Saracen’s Head almost distracted us from scenery that by this stage was pretty impressive by anyone’s standards.

For by the time you get to Symonds Yat West and East the Wye has burrowed its way through the local limestone to create a thickly wooded gorge that towers 150 metres above the river. The home to peregrine falcons, these riverside cliffs give a feel for what wilderness canoeing must be all about if you can ignore the hubbub from the river banks and the other canoeists and kayakers on the river.

Unfortunately we could not ignore the general brouhaha and decided that we should perhaps involve ourselves in it a little - immerse ourselves in the local culture, as it were - and imbibe a swift pint at the Saracen’s Head.

Just the one mind, then we were off again. And not far down river we came across our first rapids - action at last! Well, not quite, as what you get isn’t so much a roaring river in full spate as a large-pebble-in-a-small-pond ripple. The rapids here are only grade 1-2, but are nonetheless a good introduction to white water for beginners - people like us, in fact.

The rapids occur where the Wye flows around a small island situated mid-river, and we had been advised by the canoe hire people that we should paddle to the left of the island for the easiest passage.

However, looking for more of a challenge we decided we’d go the right - after all, there seemed to be little if any difference in the amount of white water either side of the river, and the ripples we were about to encounter surely seemed so timid that you could send a baby in a bath tub over them. That said, once we hit our rapidettes the canoe did start to rock a little - nothing alarming, but enough to liven the journey up a tad. As we paddled in the forbidden direction a current in the river somewhat surprisingly took us towards the bank rather more quickly than expected, and I, as ‘helmsman’, made moves to bring the canoe back towards the main channel.

Somewhat surprisingly again, my moves had little effect on our craft which, whilst not exactly speeding out of control, was going considerably faster than it had been at any previous point in the journey. And, just a little concerned, I noticed - as did Rob and Vicky - that we were heading towards a tree the branches of which hung very low over the river. In fact before we knew it we were about to pass right beneath said tree, although this wasn’t going to be easy as we were heading for a large overhanging bough which was only about a foot above the level of the gunwales.

This, as you may be able to picture, didn’t leave much room to manoeuvre, and as the bough swept towards us the instinctive thing to do was to grab for it in order to avoid a serious whack on the head.

Now I have no idea just how many gallons of water per second flow down the Wye at this point in its journey to the sea, but on reflection it’s pretty obvious that however many it is, three people who are by now clinging to the bough of a tree and trying to hold on to a canoe with their feet to stop it floating away are partaking of a futile exercise. And so it was that our canoe slipped gently from beneath us, but not without first lurching sideways to let a goodly amount of the Wye flood into it such that it sank a foot or two beneath the surface of the river shortly after bidding us adieu.

Rob, who had several hundred quid’s worth of camera gear slung around his neck was doing all he could to keep from falling into the river, Vicky had somehow fallen into it and scurried up the river bank faster than an water rat, and I was instructed to “Swim after the f…..g canoe!” (there’s always a natural leader in any group). So I did as instructed - I could see it would be in my own interest not to have to walk all the way back to Monmouth and say “We lost the canoe”.

As I dropped into the river I had the fleeting thought “Bloody hell, it’s cold for October” (although how would I know, never having swum fully clothed - or otherwise - in the Wye before?) and then I was off, swimming like Tarzan after our escaping vessel. It only took a few strokes to actually catch it, but to stop the damned thing moving down river was another thing altogether. Full of water, 18’ of canoe weighs in at quite a few pounds, and it was not without a considerable amount of grunting, heaving and swearing that I eventually got the bastard to the river bank and managed to empty it of water (at some point in all this I had the satisfaction of hearing a distant splash from upstream as Rob eventually lost his grip on the tree and fell into the river - that’d teach him to start handing out orders).

So, we had a canoe and three canoeists wetter than an otter’s pocket, but no paddles, which along with the rest of the gear we’d stowed in the canoe were floating off towards the Bristol Channel. In that case two tree branches about the thickness of a walking stick would have to substitute as paddles - not very effective, I have to tell you.

We relaunched and flailed grimly towards the next bend in the river hoping to see our gear. All the flailing in the world wasn’t going to have us going anywhere fast with a pair of walking sticks for propulsion though, so it gave us plenty of time to enquire of a couple of fishermen sitting on the river bank as to whether they’d seen our stuff float past them, and where might it be washed up (on the assumption that they, as fishermen, would know the river and it’s currents).

Impassive as Buddhas, our piscatorial pals simply muttered “You’ll never see that lot again, mate” and that was it. No enquiries after our wellbeing, no offer to call someone downriver and ask them to watch out for our gear, no nowt. As I said earlier, miserable gits.

And apart from being gits, they didn’t know anything about the river, for as we drifted around the next bend we could see our gear widely scattered about 300 yards ahead of us. However, since our ‘paddles’ were nigh on useless this distance between us remained pretty constant since we were travelling down river at much the same rate as our belongings. We might have caught the stuff eventually, but we’d probably have been half way across the Atlantic by that time.

At this stage of our expedition (for in my opinion any ‘travel’ that involves disaster automatically gets upgraded to ‘expedition’) two eminently more sensible canoeists came to our rescue. A couple who were undertaking a canoe trip as it should be undertaken - at a leisurely pace, enjoying the sensation of life and the riverbank slipping slowly by - sized up the situation without, as I recall, even asking the obvious (“Have you fallen in”), and headed off to retrieve our gear. Within minutes we were reunited with useful things like paddles and useless things like wet sandwiches, and now we really did need to paddle with a vengeance, just to keep warm.

I dare say we broke a record or two over the next hour and a half as we made for Monmouth. Freezing cold, soaking wet and feeling like total twats, we were keen to get back to civilisation as quickly as possible and warm ourselves beside a roaring fire - this was late autumn, after all. I won’t bore you with details of our portage of the canoe back to the hire centre, excuses to the owners for our bedraggled state, or the hours spent warming up in the shower afterwards, but I will bore you with a little observation.

Which is basically that nothing is ever as easy as it first seems, and even a gentle trip down the mildest of rivers can become a minor adventure if you try to run (or maybe it should be paddle) before you can walk.

Next time I try canoeing I’ll wear a wetsuit.

What You Need to Know
Symonds Yat is a popular centre for Canadian canoeing. The gentle waters of the river are a good introduction to canoeing (well, for most people), and there are a number of companies locally who hire canoes for half-day, day or multi-day trips. They will supply all you need including life jackets and dry storage for your gear in the boat. Wetsuits are NOT necessary!

Other Activities
You can also climb on the limestone cliffs above Symonds Yat, and there’s mountain biking and walking in the Forest of Dean, on the east bank of the Wye.