Wilden is a small village about 1 mile north east of Stourport-on-Severn,

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see H ...

. It is in the Stour valley and both the River Stour and the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal pass through the parish before joining the

River Severn , name_etymology = , image = SevernFromCastleCB.JPG , image_size = 288 , image_caption = The river seen from Shrewsbury Castle , map = RiverSevernMap.jpg , map_size = 288 , map_c ...

at Stourport. Nearby is Wilden Marsh, a nature reserve of the

Worcestershire Wildlife Trust Worcestershire Wildlife Trust is one of 46 wildlife trusts throughout the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1968 to conserve, protect and restore the county's wildlife. The Trust owns and manages over 70 nature reserves across the county, part ...

History

Wilden was originally part of the parish of

Hartlebury Hartlebury is a village and civil parish in Worcestershire, England which is in Wychavon district centred south of Kidderminster. The civil parish registered a population of 2,549 in the 2001 Census. The railway station is centred 800 metr ...

, but became a separate parish in the late 19th century, before becoming part of Stourport. In the 17th century there were

slitting mill The slitting mill was a watermill for slitting bars of iron into rods. The rods then were passed to nailers who made the rods into nails, by giving them a point and head. The slitting mill was probably invented near Liège in what is now Bel ...

s on the River Stour near to the site of present

church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship * C ...

. Eventually, these mills came into the ownership of the Wilden Iron and Tin Plate Company and the Baldwin family. A lock at Pratt's Wharf (misnamed Platt's Wharf by the

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

) on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, connected the canal with the river. This enabled canal barges to use the River Stour to deliver timber to a steam saw-mill in Wilden. Later it was used to transport coal and iron to the Wilden Works. The wharf was built by Isaac Pratt from Henwick,

Worcester Worcester may refer to: Places United Kingdom * Worcester, England, a city and the county town of Worcestershire in England ** Worcester (UK Parliament constituency), an area represented by a Member of Parliament * Worcester Park, London, Engla ...

in 1835. He is described as a businessman and a merchant. There were two houses at Pratt's Wharf, one occupied by a lock keeper and the other by a clerk. The link was closed c1950.Stourport-on-Severn Civic Society. Newsletter No 41. June 2005.

References

External links

S&W Canal
{{authority control Villages in Worcestershire Stourport-on-Severn