Tagged: avon-gorge
A Constitutional to Burwalls and Back
21 Dec 2021
The recent lack of posts here is mostly due to my feeling very run down following having a couple of wisdom teeth extracted. Having had an emergency appointment yesterday1, hopefully I'll be on the mend now, though it does mean I'm on the kind of antibiotics where you can't touch alcohol for the whole of the Christmas period. I have tried to keep myself a little distracted from the pain by working on the nuts and bolts of this website—you should notice that the front page loads rather faster now than it used to, and that there's a shiny new statistics page that I'll probably be continuing to work on. Oh, and you should find that the tags below the photos are now clickable and will take you to a page of all other wanders that have photos with the same tag.
Today I felt like I needed to drag myself out of the house, but I didn't want to go too far, and I needed to get to the Post Office up in Clifton Village to post a Christmas card (spoiler for my parents: it's going to be late. Sorry.) As luck would have it, idly looking at the map I spotted that I'd missed off a section of Burwalls Road in the past, and that's basically one of the long-ways-round to Clifton Village, crossing the river to Rownham and walking up the hill on the Somerset side before coming back across the Suspension Bridge.
As I was heading for Burwalls Road I decided to make Burwalls itself the focal point of the walk, but unfortunately the mansion grounds are private and the place is hard to snap. Still, at least it gave me a destination. Burwalls was the mansion built by Bristol press magnate Joseph Leech, who I've mentioned before after buying a vintage book he wrote on a previous wander. There's a good article about the house on House and Heritage which has some photos from angles I couldn't ever get to. (Well, maybe with a drone, but it seems like the kind of area where they may be kitted out for clay pigeon shooting, so I probably wouldn't risk it.)
1 My dentist admitted that she probably needed to keep her internal monologue a bit more internal after we started the appointment with her staring into my mouth and immediately saying, "oh, *that's* weird." These are words one doesn't want to hear from a medical professional.
As my plan was to knock off the remaining section of Burwalls Road, my first photo is the small segment of Burwalls itself that you can see from near my house. Burwalls is the mansion on the hilltop, peeping out about halfway from the left edge of the photo and the Suspension Bridge.
Most every time I cross the bridge, I remember one of the first times I walked over it, back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when some wag—possibly even Banksy, who knows?—had painted a sign on the footway about here: a rectangle of yellow caution stripes containing the words "WARNING. CONCEALED TRAPDOORS IN OPERATION".
Technically that's still actually the Hotwell Road down there, and it doesn't become the Portway until the Bridge Valley Road junction, but I needed the alliteration, okay?
This is the kind of photograph that I really like, but is harder to find appreciation for these days—the Panavision aspect ratio I've chosen, 2.35:1, doesn't play nicely with today's standard media consumption device of a mobile phone held in portrait orientation. Maybe one day we'll all be using the internet through VR headsets and landscape orentation will make a comeback.
Ticking Off a Pocket of Paths in Leigh Woods
03 Jun 2022
I managed to go for a wander a while ago that was meant to finish off a little tangle of paths in Leigh Woods, or at the very least finish off my wandering of the Purple Path there. And I managed to miss doing either of those things through some kind of navigational incompetence.
Today I woke up with a bit of a headache, feeling a bit knackered as soon as I dragged myself out of bed, but at least with the energy to realise that I'd be better off (a) going for a walk in what looked likely to be the last of the Jubilee weekend sunshine than (b) moping around the flat until it started raining, at which point I could mope more thoroughly.
I had a look at my map, considered going to Ashton Court, but remembered that there was a music festival there today, and instead found these little leftovers of Leigh Woods and decided to have one more try at walking them.
A Coffee and a Curve
27 Mar 2022
I wanted to have a wander along to the Tobacco Factory Market for some shopping, and checking the map for any leftover nearby streets I noticed a tiny curve of road on the way into the modern flats at Paxton Drive that it didn't look like I'd walked down before. I wouldn't take me too far out of my way, so I decided to head there first and then across to North Street to get my groceries and a coffee...
Leigh Woods Purple Path
12 Mar 2022
There's a few tracks in Leigh Woods that lie within my mile and show up on my map but that I've not walked yet, so I decided to take one of my traditional big long walks through the woods on this nice crisp sunny morning.
For years—decades, even—I've been doing a similar route from my place, along the towpath to the far woods entrance, up the hill for a varied walk on one of the marked tracks and then across the Suspension Bridge to Clifton Village for a coffee-based reward. It's my default "long walk", really, and I almost always enjoy it. Today, at last, spring actually seemed to be springing, which made for some extra positivity...
I've always enjoyed the optical illusion that these houses are on stilts from this angle. In fact there's the Hotwell Road the National Express coach is on in between the houses at the back and the disused landing stage at the front, as you'll see in the next pic of the adjacent terrace.
The Campbell Brothers' White Funnel Fleet operated from the Hotwells landing stage up until relatively recently. Last week I bought an old timetable on eBay and popped it up on my blog for anyone who might be interested.
In 1965, the year of the timetable, there were regular sailings from here along the coast or over to Wales. You could go to Ilfracombe and Lundy Island, or head across to Barry, Penarth or Cardiff. All from within five minutes' walk of my front door.
The towpath is a lovely stroll in weather like this. Waterproof walking shoes help, though, as the puddles are often wide enough to span the entire width. I baptised my new walking shoes on this trip.
This is probably the most popular spot to take photos of the bridge from this direction. I'd guess the large majority of photos of the Suspension Bridge are taken from the other side.
There are several ways into Leigh Woods along the towpath, all underneath bridges of the Portishead branch line that runs above.
At the one before this, which is normally locked and leads into a disused police shooting range, a woman beckoned me over to where she was standing with her bike, looking through the gates. "I think I've found your best shot today," she said Sadly, the very wide lens on the camera would have made any picture of the young deer that was standing in the sunlit distance a bit rubbish, so I contented myself with a few moments just looking at the scene.
One of the things you learn as you improve as a photographer is when not to bother trying to take a photo because you can't do it justice, and to just be in the moment and enjoy it instead.
Near and Far
05 Jan 2022
I took advantage of a rare recent day where it wasn't tipping down with rain to get away from my desk on a lunchtime workday and head up to Clifton Village. I'd hoped to snap a reproduction of historical photo which I'd worked out had been taken from the Suspension Bridge, but the gods were not smiling on me. Still, taking only a nice long lens with me worked out very well as the lovely haze of the day made more distant views quite dramatic...
A Random New Year's Day Wander
01 Jan 2022
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
Bower Ashton is an interesting little area just south of the river from me—in fact, the Rownham Ferry used to take people over from Hotwells to Bower Ashton, operating from at least the twelfth century to around the 1930s.
It's a strangely contradictory little area, with a cluster of old and new houses sandwiched in between the busy A-roads and significantly more industrial area of Ashton and the bucolic country estate of Ashton court roughly east to west, and also between Somerset and Bristol, north to south.
I've been around here before, mostly poking around Bower Ashton's arguably most well-known bit, the Arts faculty campus of the University of the West of England, but I'd missed at least Parklands Road and Blackmoors Lane, so I initially planned just to nip across briefly and wander down each in turn. On a whim, though, I texted my friends Sarah and Vik in case they were out and about, and ended up diverting to the Tobacco Factory Sunday market first, to grab a quick flat white with them, extending my journey a fair bit.
To start with, though, I nipped to a much more local destination, to see something that you can't actually see at all, the Gridiron...
(I also used this wander as a test of the cameras in my new phone. I finally upgraded after a few years, and the new one has extra, separate wide and telephoto lenses compared to the paltry single lens on my old phone. Gawd. I remember when speed-dial was the latest innovation in phones...)
I decided to try out the three lenses on my new iPhone camera. This is the "telephoto" lens. It does a reasonably creditable job, though the phone is oversharpening things a bit and I'm not sure I like the colours much.
And here's the middling lens on the camera. Not bad, though on every shot I've taken on the iPhone so far where it's been able to see blue sky it's managed to oversaturate it for my tastes. Still, I guess they're aiming at the mass market, and the mass market does seem to like oversaturated colour and the sharpening turned up to eleven.
Not bad, and it's certainly better than not having a wide-angle lens in your pocket everywhere you go. I won't complain too much. "My iPhone oversaturates my photos. Also my wallet is too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are pinching..."
I went out simply wanting to knock off the very last little unwalked section of Clanage Road, over by Bower Ashton, which has been annoying me for a while as it's quite close by and I've walked the other bits of it several times. So, my plan was to nip over to Greville Smyth Park via a slightly unusual route to wander Clanage Road and tick it off.
Along the way, though, I inevitably got a bit distracted. I took a few photos of Stork House, a grand Hotwell Road building that's recently been done up a bit (I imagine it's student lets, though I'm not sure) and which I found a reference to in a book about the Port Railway and Pier the other week, and also tried to match up a historical photo of Hotwells before the Cumberland Basin Flyover System laid it waste, which included some interesting markers I'll have to do a bit more digging into...
The more I research it, the more I find that Hotwells had far better transport links back in Victorian and Edwardian times than it has today. Along with buses that went to more useful places than the City Centre, there were trams, the funicular up to Clifton, the landing stage for paddle steamer services and two railway stations all within easy walking distance of me.
Today I took a day off work as preparation for doing the bookkeeping for my tax return1, and took a wander along to the site of what would have been my nearest station, Hotwells (or Clifton, as it started out in life), nestled in the shadow of the suspension bridge, the Bristol terminus of the Bristol Port Railway and Pier.
From there I wandered down the Portway, following the original line, until I got to the area around Sneyd Park Junction, where the tunnel from the slightly later Clifton Extension Railway joined up with this originally-isolated BPR line. Then I headed up to Clifton through the "goat gully" at Walcombe Slade, seeing the few above-ground bits of evidence of the tunnel (which is still in regular use) along the way.
It was a lovely day, and a good walk, and it was interesting to daydream of the times when I could have walked a few minutes from my flat down to Dowry Parade, caught a short tram ride to Hotwells Stations, and then headed from there to Avonmouth, perhaps even to board a transatlantic passenger service. The completion of the Clifton Extension Railway that linked the Avonmouth station with Temple Meads made relatively direct transatlantic travel from London via Bristol possible, with passengers travelling up from Paddington to Temple Meads, on to Avonmouth on the Clifton Extension Railway and Port Railway and Pier line, then perhaps catching a Cambpell's paddle steamer—which sometimes acted as tenders for large steamers—to a larger ship that was headed out for Canada, say.
1 I've learned that the best approach is to take two days off and deliberately do something that's not my bookkeeping on the first day, as otherwise I just inevitably end up procrastinating and feeling guilty on the first day no matter what. I have an odd brain, but at least I'm learning strategies for dealing with its strange ways as I get older...
2 Information mostly gleaned from Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier and the Clifton Extension Railway, The Oakwood Press, 1975.
St Vincent's Parade looking a bit more run-down than normal. This street, like the one I live in, was built as lodging houses for visitors to the hot wells. I imagine it was quite a pleasant aspect before later developments like the building of the Portway.
I didn't go inside, just shot through the gate with a steady hand. I have been in there, though, on one of the open day tours.
From The Bristol Hotwell, by Vincent Waite, ISSN 1362 7759, Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 2002 reprint.
...in 1867 the new Pump Room was in turn demolished so that Hotwell Point could be removed and river navigation made safer. Thus the spring was lost after a long and eventful history. After much public agitation and complaining in the local press the spring was enclosed and piped to a small grotto hollowed out in the rock. Here a pump was set up in 1877 and an attendant provided by the Bristol Docks committee. In 1880 Dr. Griffin wrote a warning letter to the newspapers claiming that his analysis of this pump water proved that it was not from the original spring which in any case was too far away to retain its correct temperature. Yet up to 1913 the pump was still in use, and sometimes supplied as many as 350 persons a day. Then the long-threatened pollution of the water by the river became too obvious to be ignored and the pump was closed. The entrance, blocked up by a small wooden door, can still be seen in Hotwells Road near the Suspension Bridge.
The wooden door is no longer here, but this is definitely the place.
One of the many problems with the Hotwell Road and Portway is the complete dearth of places to safely cross this road, with a varying number of lanes and a speed limit that hits 50mph for stretches.
You can stand for a very long time looking both ways before taking your life into your hands and scurrying across. It took me quite some time to dash to the other pavement at the point where this one runs out and your only choice is to head up the Zig Zag or cross.
It's a (glass-fibre reinforced, I think) concrete roof to keep falling rocks from blocking the road at this particularly friable bit of the cliff face.
The Gridiron and Bower Ashton Part Two
03 Dec 2021
On my last wander, to Bower Ashton, I was intending to knock Blackmoors Lane off my list "to-do" list, but got a bit diverted. I also took a little look into the history of the Gridiron, once a cheaper alternative to dry dock that was nestled just south of North Entrance Lock.
Today I had to go to send a parcel off somewhere, so I decided on going to the North Street Post Office via Blackmoors Lane. I didn't have much intention of anything else, but as luck would have it I walked out both at low tide and also as some lockkeepers seemed to be having a bit of a training session, and one of the more senior people was (a) happy to answer a few random questions on the Gridiron and (b) actually knew a lot about it, as Gridiron maintenance had been one of his jobs, more than twenty years ago...
I skipped the photography for the part of the wander where I went to the Post Office on North Street to send my old phone back to Apple for some trade-in, so here we are back at the end of Spike Island, heading back toward Hotwells.
Last photo of the day: I had the luck to walk past AcerONE as he was putting the finishing touches to this new piece under the flyovers of the Cumberland Basin. It's called Avon Gorge. I love the stylised, stained glass feel to it.
He said he still had some shading to do, so I'll try getting another snap of the finished article on another day.