Tagged: bridge
Leigh Woods Walk
14 Mar 2021
An enormous walk today, or at least it felt enormous. My feet are sore, anyway. I started off recreating a couple of local historical photos in Hotwells, but then headed for my traditional walk along the towpath in the Avon Gorge to the far extreme of Leigh Woods, up and through the woods to the height of the Suspension Bridge, finally crossing into Clifton Village for a well-deserved vanilla latte.
I say "traditional" because this used to be a very regular route for me, first walking, years and years ago, and later jogging—this route combined with a circuit of the Downs on the other side used to be my way of making sure I was fit to do a half-marathon (I did six of them in total, between 2010 and 2014).
I miss the routine of this walk, even though it's a long way and it used to pretty much wipe me out when I did it—I'd come back home and collapse and do very little for the rest of the day. But perhaps that's what Sundays are for, and I should try to remember that.
Doing this walk regularly was quite a meditative experience. Not so much of that today, but once I got to the further extreme of the towpath, where the roar of the Portway traffic on the other side of the river dwindles and I turned into Leigh Woods to climb ever closer to birdsong and further from rushing cars, I did seem to recapture a little of the feeling of previous walks. (I would say my mind cleared, but I was mentally singing along to Life Without Buildings' The Leanover for most of the wander. There are worse songs to have stuck in one's head, though; it's a great track...)
Anyway. Apparently the walk made me more likely to ramble in words, too. I'll stop now :)
Photograph by L. Worsell, Bristol. Courtesy Bristol Archives/The Vaughan Collection
The roofed area below the Suspension Bridge is called The Gallery; it's there to prevent rocks from the particularly friable cliff face below the bridge from falling onto the Portway. It's also the rough former location of the Hotwells Halt railway station on the Port Railway and Pier, built in 1917 to handle the large number of wartime munitions workers travelling out to Avonmouth.
I enjoy shooting it from the other side, but it's hard to catch it at a photogenic moment. It's great when it's misty.
Well, the gate is pretty secure. I understand that if you're an agile teenager it's not that hard to get in, but if I ever had any wild trespassing days they're long over now :)
I recently indulged myself by buying a little piece of history. I've mentioned Samuel Loxton and featured and linked to his drawings before, often in the eminently browsable Loxton Collection albums that Bristol Libraries has on Flickr. So when I saw a Loxton drawing of Hotwells pop up on eBay, I decided to get myself a little treat.
I don't think there's any Loxton drawing that features the road I actually live in—it's not very visible from anywhere else, not being one of these Clifton terraces that's perched at the top of a hill, or anything like that, and it's invisible in most views of the area. However, this Loxton drawing, Hotwells, Looking across the river from near the Clifton Bridge station, is probably the closest near-miss I've seen.
I decided to wander out one morning and see if I could reproduce the picture, and also take a photo or two of what's now become of the Clifton Bridge Station, which is still just about discernible in places.
(Then on an even stranger whim I decided to check out a possible little cut-through from Cumberland Road to the harbourside I'd been eyeing up on my commute to work, so walked to Wapping Wharf for a croissant via this potential new route, but that bit's not quite as interesting...)
At the other end of the Clifton Bridge Railway Station is a little road bridge that I've crossed many times. It's nice to see, under the inevitable tagging, that it's called Clifton Bridge Overbridge, so the name of the old station does live on a little in reality, at least for Network Rail.
(The footbridge from earlier is called Rownham Hill Bridge on its little placard.)
Every now and again some speedboat pops under Merchants Road Bridge and does a few quick loops of the Cumberland Basin. I guess that either they're allowed to go fast on the basin or they know they can get away with it...
I think this was about my best attempt to match the Loxton angle. The fact that my photo still has the edge of Entrance Lock in it suggests that Loxton's drawing was taken from a little further downstream, but there are trees there now, obscuring the view.
Much of the buildings further back are unchanged, as you can see, especially Windsor Terrace to the left and The Paragon middle top. The diagonal rise of Freeland Place is still there, too. What's mostly changed is the closer road, where a chunk of Hotwells, including the houses and Cumberland Hall you can see in the Loxton drawing, was swept away for the Cumberland Road flyover system. This probably also explains why there aren't so many pedestrians just enjoying the scenery—it's much noisier there now.
Hurrah! Cumberland Road is fully closed again, this time apparently for stabilisation works on the Chocolate Path, one of my favourite footpaths in Bristol, whcih has been closed since even before part of it actually fell into the river.
That there is an actual plan to re-open the path, that it's got funding, and that work is being done are all good signs, but I'm still trying not to hold my breath. This path's been closed since 2016. (And the entire new cut didn't take this long to dig in the first place...)
Bedmo and Ashton Court
21 Nov 2020
A rather more wide-ranging weekend wander with Sarah and Vik, taking in some mock Tudor bits of Bedmo (I should note that I've subsequently been corrected to "Bemmie", but I'm an outsider and have been calling it "Bedmo" for short for decades...), a chunk of Ashton, a path up Rownham Hill called Dead Badger's Bottom(!), The Ashton Court estate, a bit of the UWE campus at Bower Ashton, and some of the Festival Way path.
The Bristol Society of Model and Experimental Engineers seems like it would be a fine organisation to be involved in. This it the model railway at Ashton Court.
Snowy Leigh Wander
24 Jan 2021
I started this wander with my "support bubble" Sarah and Vik, after Sarah texted me to say "SNOW!" We parted ways on the towpath and I headed up into the bit of Leigh Woods that's not actually the woods—the village-like part in between Leigh Woods and Ashton Court, where I'd noticed on a map a church I'd not seen before. I found St Mary the Virgin and quite a few other things I'd never experienced, despite having walked nearby them many, many times over many years, including a castellated Victorian water tower that's been turned into a house...
For whom the bridge tolls? Not for me, that's for sure, though I think the first time I walked across it, probably in the 1990s, I did wonder if someone would pop out of a tollbooth and ask me for 20p, as I didn't know it was free for pedestrians.
Seems to lead onto a field below the posh houses on Rownham Hill, which I have a couple of snaps of in a mo.
It's a lychgate and a war memorial. I read all the names, but the photos I took didn't really do them justice. Being there and reading them felt important, though, perhaps because in the book I'm reading, EH Young's Chatterton Square, the Second World War is about to start. The novel is set in a fictional Bristol and was written (I think) and published just post-war, in 1947, and she managed to give a very looming feeling to the upcoming conflict.
This memorial, though, is to the dead of the First World War. It's even possible that EH Young herself stood here and read it at some point. She describes at least one walk on this side of the bridge in Chatterton Square, and she lived in Bristol for quite some time.
The Long Lunchtime at the End of the World
27 Nov 2020
I took an extra-long break at lunchtime today as I'd taken the day off my normal day-job to do the accounts for my previous side-job, which is still generating paperwork, though not much in the way of money. This took me through some undiscovered bits of Cliftonwood, including Worlds End Lane, which unexpectedly leads to White Hart Steps. That's certainly not where I expected the end of the world to lead to...
A long ramble, starting with trying to find the Hot Well of Hotwells and leading up the side of the Avon Gorge to the Downs and then through Clifton for coffee.
Fruitless Coffee Excursion
01 Dec 2020
Unfortunately by the time I got to Greville Smyth Park I was already about halfway through my lunch-hour, and the queue was too long to wait to actually get a coffee. Is that a fruitless excursion? Presumably a coffee bean is technically a fruit...
This kind of vague musing was sadly overshadowed by my delay at Ashton Avenue Bridge on the way back, where someone—hopefully still a someone, rather than a body—was being stretchered up the bank of the river, presumably having just been rescued from the water. As I made my way home the long way around, avoiding the cordoned-off area at the back of the CREATE centre and its car park, I saw an ambulance haring across the Plimsoll Bridge, siren running, presumably on its way to the BRI. I'd like to think that was a good sign.
Nothing New
02 Dec 2020
This may be the very first time I've gone for a One Mile Matt wander and not actually gone down any new roads, trod any new steps. I just wanted a coffee, frankly, so I went the same old way to Imagine That in the marina and back again.
I'm always a little worried that one day a swan's going to get garotted by this wire strung across the bit of Cumberland Basin behind the little causeway. It's used by the water football (?) people to string their goal up.
Bedminster, Ashton, Ashton Court sunset walk
12 Dec 2020
A walk with Sarah focusing on Ashton and the surrounds, taken on a day with really nice light around sunset. Just what I needed.
Drained Basin
15 Dec 2020
On the down side, I got to Bedminster and found long enough queues at both Mark's Bread and Hopper Coffee that I gave up on the idea of buying a drink and a pasty (from the former) or a mince pie flapjack (from the latter.) On the up side, I got to take some pictures of Cumberland Basin being drained and sluiced out, part of its regular maintenance cycle.
Just looking at this scares me a little. In an episode of Columbo featuring a flying instructor (I think), someone asks the scruffy detective if he's scared of heights. "I don't even like being this tall," he replies, and I can sympathise.