River Dee

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The River Dee is a 70-mile (110km) long river. It travels through Wales and England and also forms part of the international border between them.

The river rises in Snowdonia, Wales, flows north via Chester and discharges to the sea into an estuary between Wales and The Wirral Peninsula.The lower reaches of the river are unusual in that comparatively little water occupies so large a basin. One theory of a contributory factor to the large basin is that once the River Mersey and/or the River Severn flowed into the Dee. A more recent theory, however, is that the estuary was not formed by water, but by ice being pushed southwards by the pressure of an icecap over the Irish Sea.

At Chester, the river passes around the Earl's Eye(s) meadow, a protected green space between the Boughton and Handbridge suburbs of the city. The river is crossed by a ferry from Boughton to the meadows, and at the Groves, a Victorian riverside recreation area with a bandstand, benches and boat cruises, by two bridges. The first is the Queen's Park Suspension Bridge, which forms the only exclusively pedestrian footway across the river in Chester. The second is the Old Dee Bridge, a road bridge and by far the oldest bridge in Chester, being built in about 1387 on the site of a series of wooden predecessors which dated originally from the Roman period.

Above the Old Dee Bridge, the river has a weir, which was built by Hugh Lupus to supply power to his corn mills. Throughout the centuries, the weir has been used to power corn, fulling, needle, snuff and flint mills. The same weir was used as part of a hydroelectric scheme in 1911 with the help of a small generator building which is still visible today, used as a pumping station for water since 1951. However. the first water pumping station here was set up in 1600 by John Tyrer who pumped water to a square tower built on the city's Bridgegate. It was destroyed in the Civil War but an octagonal tower built in 1690 for the same purpose lasted until the gate was replaced with an arch in the mid-18th century.

On this weir is a fish pass and fish counting station to monitor the numbers of salmon ascending the river. A residual flow of at least 364 Ml/d is maintained over Chester Weir in all but the most testing of droughts, safeguarding the passage of migratory fish and limiting the ingress of saline water over the weir during high tides.

A little further downstream stands the Grosvenor Bridge (designed by architect Thomas Harrison of Chester, which was opened in 1833 to ease congestion on the Old Dee Bridge. This bridge was opened by Princess Victoria five years before she became Queen. A view of the river prior to the bridge can be seen in a painting by John Glover. The painting also shows St John's prior to its collapse (1881). N.B the artist emigrated to Tasmania in 1821.

The other side of the Grosvenor Bridge is the Roodee, Chester's race course and the oldest course in the country. This used to be the site of Chester's Roman harbour until, aided by the building of the weir, the River Dee silted up to become the size it is today. The only curiously remaining reminder of this site's maritime past is a stone cross which stands in the middle of the Roodee which exhibits the marks of water ripples. To the end of the Roodee the river is crossed again by a second bridge, now carrying the Chester–Holyhead railway line, before leaving Chester. It was the scene of one of the first serious railway accidents in the country, the Dee Bridge disaster.

The water has never been sufficient to scour out an adequate navigation channel through the deep glacial silt. Man has also probably contributed to the silting up of the Dee. At one time the Dee Mills, owned by the earls of Chester, operated 11 waterwheels and also constructed a weir across the river at Chester, which reduced the tidal limit and the scour of the river. It is also possible that upland deforestation in Wales altered drainage patterns and also contributed to the silting.

To the north of Chester, the river flows along an artificial channel, excavated when Sealand and Shotton were reclaimed from the estuary. In 1737, a major construction programme began to divert the course of the river. Known as the New Cut, the diversion redirected the Dee through an artificial channel some 10 miles long from the city towards Connah's Quay, and took the river five miles south of its original course. The New Cut meant that large tracts of land could be reclaimed - this area is now known as Sealand, where a large retail park and trading estate currently exist. The diversion failed to solve the problem of the Dee silting up, however.

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