I’ve spent most of this week working on Ellesmere College’s Adventure + holiday activities club. On Tuesday, we had a blast in the canoes on The Mere in Ellesmere itself to have some fun and learn some basic skills. Today we decided to put some of those skills to the test by spending the day on a journey on the River Severn.

We’re very fortunate in Shropshire to have easy access to such a great touring river so close by, and with numerous options for half day and full day trips. On this occasion, we decided to start at Crew Green and paddle downstream to Montford Bridge – a journey of approximately 16km.

The nice thing about the river is that it has a constant flow. As long as you keep the boat reasonably straight, and give it a bit of forward momentum with the paddle, you’ll find yourself covering fair distances without too much effort as the steady current takes you along. Although one or two of the paddling pairs seemed to find it hard to keep the canoe straight, we still made good progress at about 4km/h, whilst being able to enjoy the countryside on what turned out to be a perfect day.

At the start of the day, a couple of the group didn’t seem to be overly impressed at the idea of spending most of the day paddling through the countryside in a canoe, no matter how much I tried to stress that it was a real privilege to get to see the wildlife that lives in the river bank. However, once they started to accept the experience for what it is, relax and take it in, there were lots of comments about how beautiful the journey was.

We arrived at Montford Bridge almost exactly at the time we’d predicted (not always the case!), as did our pre-arranged transport. After half an hour or so of getting the boats and kit out of the water and onto the trailer, we were away without anyone having taken an unplanned swim – perfect.