The sandbanks of the River Severn at Epney

I wanted to upload a panorama of the River Severn, but after trying many times I couldn't upload it to Blip. Instead do have a look at it on my Fickr album here. It is rather a large file, but you should be able to zoom in to the detail.


Here is the story I posted earlier:
I'd arranged to pick up a batch of six bottles of keffir from the wonderful Jess’s Ladies Organic Dairy. They have a refrigerated store in a cabin beside the dairy with an honesty box. Their farm is in Hardwicke which is fairly close to Gloucester, and I drove there before 11am to make sure they didn’t sell out. 

From there I thought it was a good morning to drive down to the River Severn, which is only about four miles away. I’m so glad I did. The tide was quite low so that some of the mid-river sandbanks and the riverside banks were exposed, which always attracts birds to both rest and feed safely. Today there were so many varieties and numbers of birds - several types of geese and gulls, little egrets and common herons. 

At Epney I stood watching from the road which runs right beside the river for about two hundred yards. A strengthened high wall drops down to the river and acts as a bank which acts to prevent the undercutting of the apex of the river’s big meander, as well as protecting against flooding of the surrounding farmland.

It seemed very peaceful as I stood there taking odd pictures of birds flying up and down river as well as feeding in the mud. I don’t often see so many birds and was intrigued at one point when several groups of geese formed up in a line astern and headed directly towards the river bank. When they reached the banks they waded out for a very short time and then turned around and swam back to the sandbank in the middle of the river.

It then occurred to me to try a panorama of the scene so I took a series of images from right to left. It is looking south towards the hamlet of Framilode. I’m amazed that they have worked well as a panorama using Lightroom’s merge facility. The result was an 80 MB file but  even though I’ve tried a reduced size image I still couldn't post it here as a blip. Instead here are little and large, which looked as if they would optically collide but of course they didn't. I hope you liked the panorama show on the flickr link above.

I've added a pin to show the location on a map.