Walk Two - King's Caple
The image at the top of the page shows a farmer’s tunnel between King’s Caple and Fawley, near the old Strangford Bridge.
Tunnels and polytunnels
A walk through King’s Caple unveils more polytunnels than old railway tunnels. Reached by road bridge from Hoarwithy or country lane from Brockhampton and How Caple, the rural parish is bounded on three sides by an extravagant loop of the Wye. Its other, eastern boundary runs roughly parallel with the line of the old Hereford, Ross& Gloucester Railway.
We start at the Norman motte and bailey site of Caple Tump, opposite the church. Down the lane leading to Sellack Boat, the residence of Shieldbrook was once an inn called the Old Boar, where bargemen could find hospitality. Just around the corner was the wooden shed converted into a squatter’s house called Boathouse in 1800 by Francis Harris. The Harris family earned a living fishing and operating the ferry to the Sellack side of the river until grandson George made Augustin Ley wait once too often to get from one side to the other; the unforgiving vicar used his considerable influence to have a suspension footbridge replace the ferry in 1895.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the occupier of Poulstone Court, Mr Hatling, had all his fish taken from a pond, a horse robbed of its mane and tail, two sheep stolen and about 20 young apple trees maliciously cut to pieces; it was at a time when the navvies building the railway were making regular trips to the Courts for thieving, fighting and generally causing mayhem. In a typical day during the construction of Fawley Tunnel, a miner would shovel about twenty tons a day and compensate for the energy he lost by eating and drinking his way through about 2lbs of bread, 2lbs of meat and ten pints of ale.
Beyond the parkland of Poulstone, a bridle route takes us along the path of a Roman road and under the old railway line. Strangford Bridge can be seen over to the right, spanning the Wye. At about 11pm on the evening of Friday 28th March, 1947, 20 minutes after a goods train had crossed the bridge, the locals heard a loud roar and rushed out to investigate. To their horror they found that the centre pier of the bridge had collapsed and brought down two adjoining sections. The signalman at Fawley Halt, also on our route, was alerted and a message sent to Ross Station to ensure that further trains were diverted away. Some put the collapse down to heavy floods undermining the foundations of the bridge while others thought it had been weakened during the Second World War when several bombs had fallen 200 yards away; the conjecture was that their real target was Rotherwas munitions factory some six miles away.
A handy distance across the greensward from Fawley Halt is Fawley Court which dates back to the early 16th century and Sir John Kyrle, a relative of the famous “Man of Ross.” Kyrle bought his baronetcy and added a new stone wing to the old timber framed house in about 1630. There’s no pub in King’s Caple today. The last one, the British Lion, near the old station site, became a private house in March 2000; and it’s now difficult to see the old railway tunnel for the trees. The tunnels which we can see along our route - affording cover for crops - incite strong opinions in this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The growers who use them accuse those who oppose them of tunnel vision.