Upstream of Bideford Long Bridge, the river has seen a lot of activity in the last few weeks.

Each year Skern Lodge takes around six thousand young people to canoe and raft from the steps at Little America and travel downstream through the Long Bridge and Bideford Harbour – they are the largest annual number of harbour users. It’s a pleasure to see these young people enjoying the river.

This autumn, Little America has had different neighbours with a barge and temporary jetty built out into the river. From these structures test drilling has been undertaken to ascertain rock conditions preparatory for a horizontal tunnel that is to be bored under the river. This will take the electric cable, due to make landfall from the Morocco solar
farm at Cornborough, on its way to further distribution in the south west and beyond. Solar energy from this proposed Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project is projected to provide electricity for up to seven million homes by the early 2030s.

Completely unrelated was an unusual design machine on the railway bridge at Landcross (Iron Bridge) which had telescopic arms that reached from the walkway under the bridge and enabled technicians to inspect all parts of the superstructure above the water. A couple of weeks later, peering through the rear doors of a very ordinary looking white van, a mass of technical equipment was linked to a diver with air supply and camera who was surveying the underwater structure. This is part of the regular bridge inspection programme for safety and insurance purposes. A few years ago, divers discovered that the below-riverbed foundations of Rock Park Bridge, which links Rock Park and Seven Brethren in Barnstaple were inadequate to support the structure and the bridge was closed for repairs.

Both the above and below water teams at Landcross assured your correspondent that the bridge was safe to walk across.

Much concern has been expressed recently about the health of the Torridge, which used to be important for salmon fishing. Bideford’s entry in the Domesday Book cites a fishery worth twenty-five shillings, the most valuable in Devon. Shoals of salmon were still prolific in the 1920s, when Henry Williamson wrote Tarka the Otter, but declined after the war to such a critical level that salmon fishing was banned in the 1990s. A film about the decline of salmon in our rivers and what to do about it is to be shown at Barnstaple Library at 10am today, 10 October. 

MT TT