Chapel Rock

That's it. Chapel Rock with the "new" brdge behind. Photo thanks to Margarita Felixburger

Beside me is a little cherry red, fleece hatted head, each fleecy thread endowed with a pearly dew drop. The woman wearing the hat is otherwise encased in a 5 layer Goretex ex-army camouflaged bivybag. It’s doing its job. She’s asleep.

"We made it!" Well it took us 10 minutes to get there including circumnavigation.

I met Margarita, for that is her name, for the first time a few hours ago. And now we’re lying side by side on an area not  much bigger than a kitchen table, on an island where the useable land is smaller than my garden and taken up with a bit of chapel ruin, lumps of rock and an incongruous solar panel on a stalk.

Our island home. Thanks to Margarita for photo

Chapel Rock looks bigger than that it is: rusty grasses and marsh plants have colonized the soft fringes beyond our kayaks. Then there’s some quaky boggy stuff and then you’re into a jelly wobble of mauvey mud. The useable part, the part of Chapel Rock is pretty much fenced in by our kayaks and occupied by our bivybags.

 Margarita is asleep and I’m not and I could resent that a bit. But I don’t. This was her idea, without her genius we wouldn’t be here. I’m not going to sleep much. It doesn't matter. It’s brilliant to be here. She is clearly an efficient and competent camper and I am the least competent camper that ever loved camping. My fancy little bivybag probably works really well if it’s put up properly but I never have managed that.

At home I practiced earnestly, slotting the cute little hoop pole into the slot indicated by a friendly yellow arrow, considering how I would guy myself in fore and aft. Putting it up in the gloaming and the drizzle I toss hope and good sense back into my boat hold along with the cute pole and the peg bag. So I’m going to be wet. But everything will dry out tomorrow and it’s such an adventure and such a crazy place to be not sleeping. 

Looking towards the Severn Bridge as the ebbing tide makes our island paradise bigger

We’ve got our boats hauled up on each side of us. They hold off the wind. And, if I should happen to doze off I can at least be sure I won’t roll out into that mud. My boat Ethel will protect me. Which is a relief. The last person who slept here…wait for it…the last person who slept here was almost certainly Saint Tecla in the Sixth Century. I’m sure of that because I really doubt anyone else would have thought of sleeping here till we rocked up.

Chapel Rock has been attributed to quite a few saints, often to St Twrog who was part of the Bardsey Monastery and is better known for Maentwrog in Snowdonia. But I’m following the Journal of Antiquaries who say that Saint Tecla was here first, in the sixth century. She was escaping the court of her Romano British father King Regina. She came here to live here as an Anchorite. Her family was from Brittany. There's a tradition in Welsh lore that religious settlers came by sea from Brittany and she may have been one of them. Or not. But if she did come by sea she would have landed just where we did. Anchorites had to promise to stay put, in their cell. Sometimes they were walled in. They were consecrated in a service that was similar to a funeral service. Her time here was short. She was killed in her cell by sea pirates a few years later. Which is altogether a melancholy thought.

This can't be "our" St Tecla. No room for a bad boy lion on Chapel Rock. Photo Wikipedia 

I’m pretty sure no sea pirates will come and bump off me and Margarita. These waters are dangerous and so are we. We’re pretty strong, Margarita especially. A week ago I’d scatter-gunned emails to West Country paddlers: had anyone ever paddled round Spike Island in Bristol? I had several helpful emails but Margarita’s had stood out: precise, detailed and making an offer with a hard and fast date to it. That is rare and devastatingly helpful.

And then, unexpectedly this suggestion: “Chapel Rock” she wrote “is a bit of a mad one, not the most beautiful location, but I have always wanted to stealth camp pretty much under the motorway.”

Pre paddle park up pad

People who’ve “always wanted” to do such things are very rare and very close to my heart. I’ve always known that most of my ideas are unhinged but Margarita isn’t. She’s a serious person. She can come up with a concrete plan and stick to it. That’s so rare it needs UNESCO protection. She can tell the time on an analogue watch and do sums. What’s more she can sort out a bivy in the dark in three minutes flat and then sleep in it. What a treasure. And yet, and yet she’s got this crazy streak and an infectious laugh. So the fact that she was gently sleeping having efficiently tucked herself in warm and dry was endearing rather than annoying.

As for me, if I hitch myself up on my elbows and hold still the soggy flapping edge of my bivybag in my mouth to keep it out of my face I can take in the view: a thin rim of sedge grass and sea lavender gives ways to an ever widening slurp of shining mud. The skyscape is dark and smudgy with rain but a flock of birds are dipping and diving where the island edge dissolves. It’s night time. What kind of bird does that?

Blinking drizzle out of my eyes I watch the smudged blur of lights on the narrow span of bridge way above us, so high that I can’t hear any sound of traffic. Turn my head to the right and there’s the second bridge, built only twenty years later, suspended in an elegant curve on silvery cables.

Not too far away are the lights of Avonmouth docks, built to replace Bristol’s docks in the nineteenth century, and the Royal Portbury Docks on the South side of the Avon developed in the 1960s and 70s.  Huge car-parks for imported new cars and containers, under queasy floodlight, cranes that never sleep. Another world and one I’d like to visit.

In the moonlight, through the drizzle, I can watch the water changing as it floods out, the big barrel buoys marking the passage leaning in the current: red for port, green for starboard. Sue and I kept our eye out for them when we rushed down here an ever diminishing channel in 2019. Unforgettable. I tease myself with the question: which way would a boat be going for the passage to appear like that, going out or coming in.

Saint Margarita with Acolyte Penelope and Bridge

And here’s a thing: whatever did poor Tecla do with her time? I can imagine how it was to be a nun or a monk who farmed and fished, kept bees, made honey, drank mead. Or even tamed lions. But here, if she was not walled into her cell, she could hardly have walked 100 feet in a straightish line. She couldn’t do anything practical for her keep apart from draw water from the well. She was, as an Anchorite, committed to a life of constant prayer, enclosed, totally dependent on others bringing her food across that treacherous muddy walk way that can only be attempted at low tide on springs. I struggle to imagine how it was to be her, and defeated by this, I must have gone to sleep because I do in fact wake, the drizzle has stopped and the rising sun is gorgeous.

Sunrise from Chapel Rock

A slip that is accessible at both ends of the tide is a godsend on the Severn Estuary where the deep mud makes landing and launching hazardous.

We had launched from the ferry slip, the ferry that had been made redundant by the bridge above us. Families would queue there in solid respectable Rovers and jaunty Morris Minors. Homely, but not without incident for this water, this magnificent muddy water, is wide and fast and muscular. The range in the Severn Estuary is the second highest in the world at around 50 feet. The thrust from the Atlantic Ocean powers in, flooding on springs as far Lode Lock, near Tewkesbury. It hesitates for one moment, holds its breath before storming back out, carrying a payload of mud and debris.

Photo with thanks to Heritage Machines

This is Margarita’s home water and I’m impressed. I’ve been here before, Sue Couling and I paddled down it in 2019, from Sharpness to Penarth, 57 km and not all of it with the flow. I was so scared. An experience I have never forgotten. The landscape is vast. It’s not a soft place for people, it’s not pretty, it is a paradise wild sea birds.

Sue and me between the bridges, 2019. Photo thanks to Sue Couling

And it’s no place for hesitation. The eddy round our rocky island is hard and fast. Time to go. In the sogginess of morning I make a quick brew. It is fascinating to watch the speed and power of the eddies that have been building around our perch in the time it takes for my water to boil. The flood is reaching its high water mark and will soon be bucketing out.

By the time I've had my brew it's time to get going, fast. The water comes up at such a rate.

We did it. Photo by Margarita

Now’s the best time to launch, much later and the quaking mud will make it impossible. Every wet thing is pushed back into the holds and we’re off. It took us ten minutes to paddle out, eight minutes to paddle back. It’s been a perfect adventure, tiny but ambitious, pocket sized but fine. And I hope to have made a formidable new friend.

Margarita's Strava map

So another island has been circumnavigated and slept on. It was a tiny, excellent adventure. I'm donating £11 to Aban so that they can support young people finding strength and adventure outdoors. If you would like to, you could donate too, using the button at the top of this blog. Or you could support Aban by sharing this blog. Thank you.