26 May 2010
Water Walks In Ripon - Alongside The Skell
As you walk through the centre of Ripon alongside the River Skell, you get an appreciation of how many bridges there are. Sure, Ripon isn't Venice with its profusion of quaint, romantic curve bridges that play on the imagination nor the strong, engineered lines of the great industrial bridges of Newcastle. However, Ripon does have a lot of bridges packed into a small area.
For the short walk across Ripon, there are 11 highly functional bridges connecting Ripon between North and South, between the old and new parts of the city, and even as you get to Fisher Green a ford and 2 sets of stepping stones. Towards the North, there are 2 further bridges over the Ure - North Bridge and the Duchess of Kent Bridge - and Hewick Bridge as you leave the east of Ripon going towards Boroughbridge and York; then there are 4 footbridges over Ripon Canal. And all of this is in a short distance of 1 - 2 miles (2 - 3 kilometres). Bridges have always been important to city life - Hewick Bridge and Bishopton Bridge had chapels attached to them to encourage pilgrims to pay for their upkeep - but there were no pontage dues or Bridge Wardens in Ripon.
We start this short city walk where we left the previous walk by Borrage Lane, that is at Borrage Bridge but facing eastwards. The first thing to notice is the beautifully converted piece of local industrial architecture - the old Williamson Varnish Factory.
You walk along the river for a bit before coming out to cross over a road and past the Williamson Drive Bridge built for the newly built housing around the old Williamson Varnish Factory. Then we follow another river path that is parallel to the very old road, Barefoot Street, which used to connect Borrage Bridge to St John's Chapel. The river bank opposite is dominated by overhanging trees arching over the languid water as it flows slowly through the city, channelled by hard engineered stone and concrete walls to protect the riverbanks and houses from the Skell in spate. Brown trout can be seen hovering in the river and range in size from 3 inches to about 8 inches in length.
All too soon, we have reached Bondgate Bridge, where the mill race would have entered the river again. Opposite us, there is a quaint little white house where the owner has placed a cheap looking plaster cast of a fisherman on their wall. Ironically, someone was fishing for their tea on the bank opposite but seemingly with little luck in spite of lots of brown trout clearly visible and rising to the surface for insects. Once again, we need to walk over the road by St John's Chapel and down again on to the other side. Here you walk along a short while with a recently renovated playground opposite us on a water meadow at Bondgate Green. And it's but a short walk to Archer Bridge.
I went under Archer Bridge and continued on the south side of the Skell. Opposite, you can see the white-painted backs of some of the old buildings connected to Ripon Cathedral, while we walk on towards the Water Rat Pub past Alma Weir with its ineffectual salmon leap. Alma Weir is one of the places where the Environment Agency measures river flow, but they have also realised that it can cause the water to back up the river, so causing flooding in its own right. As a result, under the Ripon Flood Alleviation Scheme, Alma Weir is to be removed and the river gouged out to lower it and hopefully make this part of central Ripon less prone to flooding. The Water Rat and Alma Weir are the location of the world famous (okay locally quite well known) Annual Duck Race held on August Bank Holiday Weekend.
Here, I crossed over the wooden Alma Bridge to the north side of the river. Now follow, the river for a short while before you can see the remnants of an old mill race in a small patch of greenery. Now, you cross another wooden bridge where Priest Lane dips down to ford the Skell by Wolseley Center's ugly brown buildings.
We're now firmly back into parts of Ripon that suffer from flooding. Obviously, the Priest Lane Ford gets unpassable a few times a year, but now we're entering the Fisher Green area of Ripon which can get pretty wet. We walk along the Skell's south bank past the back of some industrial buildings where Interserve is doing work on the Flood Scheme and a strange little building by Fisher Green Bridge that houses NDS, which offers training in rock music ranging from guitar playing to drumming. Fisher Green Bridge is a classic sturdy piece of Victorian industrial architecture that was built to last; it was formerly the bridge for the railway line that was removed under Beeching and has been collared for the Ripon bypass. If you look up to the road you can see that the A61 has widened the original bridge simply by cutting off the sides, bunging on some wide concrete slabs that overhang the bridge base by a couple of metres each side and then stuck the edges back on again - sensible but you would not have known this from the road above.
We walk under the bridge and are basically in the countryside. Save for a few houses on the north side, the small green space northwards between the A61, the Skell to the south and the curving Ure to the east is given over to farming and washlands, which are used for walking by locals. The houses here along the Skell are all subject to flooding and you can see many of the houses have sandbags to the ready or sturdy floodgates to protect their properties.
Here I crossed the river over some stepping stones set into the river and walked a short distance along a wide green grassed footpath to the point where the Skell meets the Ure for its journey onwards towards the Humber. Here, there are a few trees but I must admit that I would like to see more - I can imagine an avenue of trees holding together the river bank and soaking up the water when the rivers get bloated. The trees around here include sycamores and willows as well as decorative cherry trees, while the river banks are currently covered in flowering wild garlic.
