PLATE XIII. OLD CHEPSTOW BRIDGE, REBUILT IN 1816, WITH POST-CHAISE CROSSING IT. _From an old picture signed W. Williams, 1783._ ]
A novel custom was associated with the Old Passage. A man suspected of possible infection of hydrophobia, was put into the salt water, and towed about in the Severn at the stern of a boat. In the event of a man having been bitten by a stray dog, this operation made his village acquaintances much easier in their minds about him. They had also the fun, and in any case the patient would not be the worse for a thorough good washing!
The appliances of the ferry were a steam boat and various sailing boats, including one known as the Mail-boat, as well as on the Beachley side, an apparatus acting as a telegraph. This consisted of an arrangement of board which, when at rest, resembled a wooden window shutter about a couple of yards square, fastened to one of the buildings; and, by some code of signals of an exceedingly simple sort, requisite directions were conveyed across the river as to the boat service.
On our side there was one solidly built pier, serviceable for shipment of passengers or goods at all states of the tide, and accessible for all kinds of carriage use from the good road which terminated at the top in front of a small kind of hotel; it likewise had the desirable security, for the greater part of its length, of strong posts with chains between them. On the Aust side there was a high- and also a low-water pier, not far apart, a little way below the inn, and if the tide served for boats to reach these all went fairly well after disembarking, but it was a different matter at half-tide. The half-tide pier was a considerable distance from the others—a quarter or half a mile away beneath the cliffs, and mud and stones and the roughest imaginable affairs in the guise of road had to be got through or over on the way to the inn. The effect of this on the springs, paint, &c., of a good Long Acre-built barouche, when by some unhappy necessity it had to be committed to such a method of transit, may be easily imagined. The passage for a carriage was, at the best, not well arranged. A muster of fishermen or boatmen was made, and the carriage was turned on the pier and dragged more or less rapidly on board, and there, I presume, secured from movement, but, certainly, by no means from danger, for part of the freight might consist of half a dozen or a dozen bullocks, which shifted to one side or the other as the vessel lurched. On the whole the transit by the Old Passage Ferry, so well known in former days, was one link in a chain of necessities which left much room for changing times to improve.