WANDERING along the River Severn towpath on a warm summer’s evening, leave the city centre and head towards Hallow.

You will come to a spot opposite the north end of Pitchcroft which gives little indication of what it once was.

Only a very steep path might be a hint.

In days gone by, where the riverbank is now covered by manicured greenery and tree branches dip down towards the water, stood a substantial wharf.

At its heart was the Dog and Duck Inn, a popular haunt of watermen working on the river, and here was the landing stage for the most-used ferry in Worcester.

The tidal bore of the Severn allowed the city to flourish as an inland port until the mid-1880s and it was only the coming of the railways that ended its dependency for prosperity on the river.

This became known as The King’s High Stream of Severn and was alive with commercial traffic.

As well as goods travelling upstream from Bristol and Gloucester to be unloaded into the warehouses on South Quay, there was also a considerable amount of traffic coming downstream from the industrial Midlands, particularly bricks and coal.

That was where the wharf at the Dog and Duck came in.

Being on the west bank of the river made it an ideal location for anything destined for the countryside villages beyond.

Horse-drawn carts would arrive from the sticks to be loaded up with the necessary materials before plodding back to destinations like Martley, Hallow, Broadwas and Wichenford. 

Due to the steep bank at this point, a narrow path was created from the wharf up to Henwick Road where the wagons would wait while the goods and materials were carried up in panniers on the backs of  donkeys.

The path is still there – today it is called Ferry Bank - and if you break your towpath saunter to walk up it, you appreciate how vertiginous it is.

Because of its hillside setting, donkeys were a familiar sight in Victorian Malvern, but there are not many instances of them being used in Worcester.

Incidentally, the Henwick area was the scene of a bizarre occurrence in 1881 when many thousands of periwinkles suddenly came out of the sky.

A lady called Mrs Millward, who witnessed the incident as a young girl, later wrote: “There was an awful storm.

“When we left school in the afternoon and heard what had happened we ran there and picked up the shellfish, putting them in our pinafores.

“They were alive and sodden with water, making our clean pinafores wet and dirty.” 

She continued: “They were chiefly on the Oldbury Road. They were all over the road and the banks were full of them and they extended over the  hedges and into the gardens.

“They began where Laugherne Road is now, continuing along Oldbury Road to Comer Gardens corner. It was a sight.

“There seemed to be tons of them.”

And where was a donkey when you needed one?