Barges at Waldringfield

Visitors to the village now generally arrive by land rather than water so will be greeted by our village sign. At its centre is a sailing barge, mysteriously embraced by a dinosaur. Few might realise that at the end of the nineteenth century, this was not only an agricultural but also a mining and industrial village: the sailing barge was essential for these activities.

The Village Sign

Waldringfield’s village sign, like several other East Coast villages, reflects some of the sailing barge activity in its history. Commemorating Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, the sails on the crown resemble boats going up and down river with waves denoting the Deben. The longship-style sail on the crown links to King Raedwald upriver. The supporting plesiosaur represents the coprolite industry and the central barge the cement and other businesses that relied upon water transport.

Location

Because of the seawalls, little of the Deben’s foreshore is now accessible. This makes the village, with its beach, a good place to trade by river. Waldringfield is halfway along the navigable Deben, and the only Deben riverside settlement of any size accessible at all states of the tide.

Sailing Barge Activity

There have been three main trades: ‘Muck and Straw’ from the early 1800s, Coprolite from the 1840s and Cement from the 1870s. All operated concurrently from the 1870s to 1890s but were gone by the early 1930s. There was also general trading of goods such as timber and coal.

The 1880s would have been the heyday with all three trades at their peak: one might picture the coprolite workers covered in reddish dust, cement workers in white and mud diggers stained blue. What colourful dust-ups they must have had at the Maybush. After this era, each industry ceased or declined to nothing.

There was then a sunset, or perhaps retirement era when some sailing barges, although not the same ones, enjoyed an afterlife as housebarges. Sadly, today, visits by a full-size barge are few and far between.

The sections below explore the different trades and may help to explain the dinosaur:

Cement Works, Mud Digging

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Portland Cement was made at Masons Cement Works in Waldringfield on the ...

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Masons (Cement) Barges

Having been surprised to discover that the Cement Works existed in Waldringfield and that there was a fleet of barges, ...

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Coprolite from Waldringfield – SB Ammonite, Fossil, Nautilus

What is Coprolite? Coprolite is a phosphate-rich clay containing fossil bones and teeth of mammals and fishes. Some coprolites were ...

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Muck and Straw Barges at Waldringfield

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, London was the largest city in the world and road transport was powered ...

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House Barges at Waldringfield

After the First World War, the Haig family, who had once lived on a converted sailing barge, the Ark Royal, in Essex, ...

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