We just love hearing from Deb. Here are a few of her recent postcards, we hope you enjoy them as much
as we do.
Greetings from Nottingham !
There is a whitewater course here where I participated in the squirt event for
the British Freestyle Championships. It was cold and windy - but good the people
and a good event made it a lot of fun.
Notes from Chester:
Dorothy and Marshall -
This is one very cool UK City. Yesterday I kayaked the River Dee
in Wales. There are a lot of access problems here, and the river
we paddled is permanently closed to kayakers. The shuttle was
paddling up the canal to the put-in, we finished at dusk in the town of
Langollen.
Take care,
Deb
Ardeche:
I hope you are enjoying the postcards. The sun came out in France.
I'm off to squirting on the river. I started in Valance, near Lyon. We
drove 8 hours SW to La Basque, near the Spain border. I am having a lot
of fun - UK and France are two very beautiful countries.
Love,
Deb
The River Dee is a 70 mile (110 km) long river, which rises in
the hills above Llanuwchllyn in
Merioneth (Gwynedd)
Wales, then passes through
Bala Lake, over the man-made Horseshoe Falls and through
Llangollen.
East of Llangollen,
Thomas Telford's
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, of
1805, carries the
Shropshire Union Canal 120 feet overhead.
At
Farndon the river crosses into
England and then passes through
Chester. At Chester the river passes under the A55 dual carriageway
and around the Earl's Eye meadows, a protected green space in between
the Boughton and Handbridge suburbs of the city. The River is crossed by
a ferry from Boughton to the meadows, and at the Groves, a Victorian
riverside recreation area with a bandstand, benches and boat cruises, by
two bridges. The first of which is the Queen s Park Suspension Bridge,
which forms the only exclusively pedestrian footway across the river in
Chester, and the second is the Old Dee Bridge, which is a road bridge
and forms by far the oldest bridge in Chester, being built in about
1387 on the site of a series of wooden predecessors which dated
originally from the Roman period.
Below the Old Dee Bridge, the river has a weir, which is now enjoyed by
canoe enthusiasts but was built by Hugh Lupus to supply power to his
corn mills with the help of a small generator building which is still
visible today. A little further along the river stands the Grosvenor
Bridge, which was opened in 1833 to ease congestion on the Old Dee
Bridge. This bridge was opened by Princess Victoria five years before
she became Queen. The other side of the Grosvenor Bridge is the Roodee,
Chester s race course and the oldest course in the country. This used to
be the site of Chester s harbour until, aided by the building of the
weir, the River Dee silted up to become the size it is today. The only
curiously remaining reminder of this site s maritime past is a stone
cross which stands in the middle of the Roodee which exhibits the marks
of water ripples. To the end of the Roodee the river is crossed again by
a second suspension bridge, now carrying the Chester Holyhead railway
line, before leaving Chester.
Below Chester, the river flows along an artificial channel, excavated
when Sealand and
Shotton were reclaimed from the estuary.
This 'canalised' section runs in a straight line for five miles and
passes beneath two road bridges at
Queensferry. The first is a modern fixed cable-stayed bridge, the
second, the Queen Victoria Jubilee Bridge, is of the rolling bascule
type.
