Which came first - the eels or the inbreds?

Recent chats with Rachel about the close relationship between inbreds and eels put me in mind of this area of the river Severn where I worked some time ago.

I was restoring an 18th century memorial tablet in a church for the surviving relative who was brought up in the area. Her and her husband are quite elderly, and to celebrate the finishing of the job, they took me to lunch at a pub overlooking the river in the centre of the crook which you can see in the map. Given a few more thousands of years and poor land management due to the holocaust caused by the Brexit fallout, that crook will one day turn into an Oxbow Lake.

The greenery you can see to the left is the Forest of Dean and the beginning of Wales. In olden times the population which lived in a cluster at the top of the crook were quite isolated. The only way to have contact with the villages on their side of the bank was to take a long walk backwards.

It was much easier to row across the river and choose their wives from the Foresters on the other side. The Foresters - being isolated themselves - found this arrangement very convenient too, and would row over to Gloucestershire to choose their own wives during times of peace.

This reciprocal arrangement worked so well that they decided to create a regular ferry crossing at that point, and over the years the Gloucestershire villages in the crook no longer bothered to go South to choose a wife any more than the Foresters went North. There were two huge gene-pools within a few hundred yards of each other, so why bother?

The ferry was taken from one side to the other by a huge rope or chain stretching across the river at its narrowest point. The operator would simply pull on it and drag the boatful of passengers both ways.

As the City of Gloucester became wealthier, shipping became heavier and the ferry was forced to close. You could not have a chain blocking the passage of all those vast merchant ships heading for port, laden with goods from all over the world.

By this time, the folk both sides of the river had got out of the habit of going further afield to seek a wife, so they began breeding with their immediate neighbours. This carried on for hundreds of years.

My client's husband told me that his wife was related to almost every person in the village in which she was brought up. People always say that the Forest of Dean is inbred, but the same is true on the other side of the Severn in the Norfolk-shaped crook.