Forums Forums General Forums A - Z Leisure & Hobbies Walking across the Dee Estuary

Hi Folks, I'm new here

People used to be able to walk/wade across The Dee, the father one of my friends used to cross from Flint to Neston at Neap Tides about in the 1950s - but he had to wear waders.

To do this you had to be very familiar with the river because the navigable channel could shift by 25 feet after each high tide. There were also quicksands and deep mud to contend with as well as very cold water from Bala Lake.

These days you don't get the very low water levels in the river because of the linking of the Bala area reservoirs and legal requirements for minimum flow rates in the river.

Also, during the last couple of years they have been using a suction dredger to maintain a channel for the barges taking A380 wings from the Airbus site at Broughton down to Mostyn Port, so the river channel is deeper.

I like the idea of a another bridge, but the Dee Estuary is a RAMSDAR protected wildlife habitat and there are five Sites of Special Scientific Interest alongside the estuary so it would be very expensive to build one in that area even if planning permission could be obtained.

I think the only option would be to build a submerged tunnel like they did for the A55 at Conway. It might be possible to get EU funding for this as an improvement of the strategic European trans-national route from Ireland - bearing in mind the problems of widening the A55.

Further down the discussion on this forum, one member referred to a discussion taking place over plans to build a Gayton-Greenfield barrage. I think the Dee Estuary maybe a protected area for wildlife so plans for that I assume would be quashed. I think that the Moreton spur on the M53 was designed to continue on into Wales, maybe continuing a path under a tunnel, as it seems an awful lot of motorway serving a low population.
http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=688757

Hi draig, I wrote my last post before reading yours unfortunately and confirms my comment about the Dee Estuary being a protected area. I wish they had built that tunnel around the same time they had built the Mersey tunnels. Also wish they hadn't closed Mostyn rail station.

Yep, agree with you there. There were enough tunnels dug under The Dee to extract coal so they could have killed two birds with one stone - obviously the birds weren't protected back then

I kayak in the Dee at high tide and its amazing that its only a few feet deep where the boats are moored in the middle.

But, as has been said, the mud under the sands is horrible.