Tagged: building
Gardens and Cottages
17 Dec 2020
I think the cute little Duncan Cottage was my favourite bit of this wander up the hill to get coffee and a pain-au-raisin from Twelve, though I did enjoy gently musing on the public and private gardens of Clifton, inspired by a closer pass than usual to Royal York Crescent's garden.
I managed absent-mindedly to clear my GPS track before saving it, so this hand-created track-log may cause me problems in the future. I suppose we'll see.
I imagine you have to live in the street to subscribe. But this got me looking up public and private gardens in Clifton and i came across CHIS's fascinating page listing many (all?) of them. I'm surprised that the garden in the very exclusive-feeling Canynge Square is actually public and maintained by the council plus a residents' garden committee. It felt very private when I was there at the weekend. I may have to go and site and read a book there just for the sake of it, one day.
To Bedminster
19 Dec 2020
Despite a mild headache, I enjoyed this wander over to Bedminster. The light was lovely, especially toward the end. I always enjoy the view down the streets south of North Street at this time of day/year, with the distant hills backdropping the Victorian terraces.
I have to think that if you need a specific parking place marked out for your signal engineer, it might be an indicator that your traffic lights aren't terribly reliable.
I think this is the rather unsalubrious back of a portacabin behind Ashton Gate Primary School.
Coming Home in the Dark
19 Dec 2020
A nice walk home in the dark early evening—we're only a couple of days away from the winter solstice—found me getting a bit lost in Southville as I tried to knock a few new streets of my list. Happily getting lost in Southville at this time of year is in no way unpleasant, and just lets you look at more Christmas lights, really.
Having got lost in Southville, I took a punt on there being a way through for pedestrians at the end of the no-through road Langton Park. I lucked out, and found this little cut-through to Greville Street
Sunday Bedmo
20 Dec 2020
A long meander around bits of Bedminster, from the river to the north to Winterstoke Road to the south, taking a few roads I've seen before, and a few I haven't. The Christmas decorations were an extra bonus.
I'd love to see this in action. I'm guessing it pivots around the top centre, but I imagine that the circular bit also does something quite cool.
EDIT: I went back and had another look a few months later and tracked down a newspaper article with some video of the gate being opened while it was under construction.
This is the second house called DUNDRY VIEW I've found on my wanders. The first is on Cornwallis Avenue, much nearer to me.
I'm guessing this is a communal garden. This little cul-de-sac end of Stackpool Road seems to have a litte community of its own going on. I like it.
Solstice Rain
21 Dec 2020
Despite the weather, Sarah and Vik and I wandered around Ashton Court a bit as the sun rose. Not that you could really tell. Sadly, the bit we wanted to watch the sunrise from was closed, because people hadn't been treating the deer with appropriate respect. Ah well, at least it was some exercise.
The yellow is the lights of Ashton Gate Stadium. I know nothing of football or its stadia, but it seems a bit odd to leave them on all night.
And quite noisy, but to be fair I was shooting at 12800 ISO, so it could definitely be worse.
There's a little spot just down to the side of the bridge on the Clifton side with a bench and some good views across the south of the city.
One of these kids is doing his own thing.
This light used to look like the other two. Apparently the head of it was taken away temporarily to be repaired and replaced by this objectively ugly bit of modern crap. The original hasn't been seen for more than a year.
On Christmas Day in the Morning
25 Dec 2020
A Christmas Day walk with my friends Sarah and Vik, taking in the shipwrecked Shadow and a hilly chunk of Leigh Woods.
I went to have a peep at the giant sinkhole that's opened up in Canynge Square—ironically, having recently discovered the gardens were public I'd had the (triangular!) square on my list to re-visit for a few days, but now there's no entrance to the gardens due to the danger. The area was well fenced-off for safety, but I tried to get a couple of photos from behind the barriers.
I also explored the area around Camp Road, an real melange of architectures, one of the most mixed-up areas I've seen in Clifton, in fact, and confirmed my friend Claire's suspicion that an earlier snap of a sign from Manilla Road was in fact for a fire hydrant. Nice.
A homeless guy used to live in that doorway. I don't know if the boarding up coincided with the religious order that used to run Emmaus House as a retreat centre moving to Whitchurch or not...
Nice top to the turret on the corner of this house on the end of Mortimer Road. Anywhere else, you'd expect it to be listed, I'd've thought...
Saint Vincent's Spring
28 Dec 2020
Fractionally outside my one-mile zone, but I got curious about Saint Vincent's spring, whose last remnants you can see in a defunct drinking fountain on the Portway. Along the way I passed Gyston's cave, sometimes called St Vincent's cave, in the sheer wall of the gorge. It's now accessible by a tunnel from the observatory—I tried it about twenty years ago, I think, and still recall the vertiginous moment of looking down from the protruding balcony and realising that you could see straight through the grille floor to the drop below—but from what I can work out the tunnel is relatively recent. Before the tunnel was dug it was accessible only by access across the cliff face, which must have been even more terrifying.
This cave was first mentioned as being a chapel in the year AD 305 and excavations, in which Romano-British pottery has been found, have revealed that it has been both a holy place and a place of refuge at various times in its history.
A few different sources say that the cave became a hermitage and chapel to St Vincent following Bristol's early trading in Iberian wines; St Vincent of Saragossa is Lisbon's patron saint, and a lot of nearby things bear the name.
I'm not sure where the crossover of Vincent and Ghyston happens, though. On the giants Goram and Vincent (or Ghyston), Wikipedia says:
The name Vincent for one of the giants rests on the fact that at Clifton, at the narrowest point of the Avon Gorge, there was formerly an ancient hermitage and chapel dedicated to St Vincent, at or near the present cave in the cliff-face which bears his name. Another (apparently modern) version of the story calls the Clifton giant Ghyston, which is in fact the name, of obscure origin, for the whole of the cliff-face of the Avon Gorge at least as early as the mid-fifteenth century, in the detailed description of the Bristol area by William Worcestre. The place-name was personified to produce the giant's name. Vincent's Cave is called Ghyston cave or The Giant’s Hole in an article in the July 1837 issue of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal.
In my research on the original Hot Well House, I've seen quite a few contemporary paintings which state their viewpoint as "from St. Vincent's Rock", so in the 16th century it seems the cliff-face name was typically St Vincent Rock rather than Ghyston's Rock, perhaps.
I am, as you can tell, no historian!
On the way, I also wandered around the base of the popular climbing area, which I think is the site of the old Black Rock quarry.
My historical research took a wander underground recently, partly inspired by the Canynge Square sinkhole, partly by St Vincent's (Ghyston's) cave and its tunnel to the Observatory, and I was surprised to find that there might be an intact tunnel from the Bristol Port Railway and Pier still just sitting there under Bridge Valley Road. A quick search turned up this recent video by an intrepid explorer, so it's definitely still there.
I went looking for the entrances today, and definitely found the south entrance, at the start of the Bridge Valley Path, the footpath that starts with steps at the bottom of Bridge Valley Road. It's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. I think I've figured out where the north entrance is, too, but it was getting dark at that stage and the Portway was still busy enough that crossing the road was still the normal nuisance, so I thought I'd leave further explorations for another day.
Despite its looks, this is neither of the two footpaths actually called the Zig Zag (the Zig Zag itself, closer to town, and the New Zig Zag, further out.) This is in fact the Bridge Valley Path
I have other pictures of the Bridge Valley Path from other days; it's not entirely photogenic, though it is a nice walk if you're okay with hills. I skipped the photos this time until I emerged at the top, in Clifton.
I'm not sure I knew until today's wander that the Bridge Valley Path exited almost opposite the Society of Merchant Ventuers' clubhouse.
A fragment from Horace's Odes: "not taught to suffer poverty."
Wikipedia says that the defunct Bristol magazine Venue once did a bit of investigative journalism on them:
Venue claimed that the Merchant Venturers control 12 charities and 40 trust funds, and also a private unlimited company, SMV Investments, that has major investments in defence contracting, tobacco, genetically modified agriculture and the petroleum industry. Merchant Venturers serve on the boards of many local charitable and cultural organisations, and are guaranteed seats on the University of Bristol Court and the Downs Committee. It quotes Paul Burton of the University's School of Policy Studies as saying, "they exert quite a bit of influence and we, the people of Bristol, don't know much about them and can't hold them to account"
A Promenade on New Year's Day
01 Jan 2021
I wandered along the gorge today and found the entrance to the disused Portnalls Number 1 railway tunnel of the Bristol Port Railway and Pier. The door was unlocked, but as soon as I opened it I felt a sense of current habitation and decided discretion was the best option. There's a lot of people homeless in Bristol at the moment, and they don't need disturbing. For the same reason, I've omitted posting some pictures of a little encampment somewhat off the beaten track of the new Zig Zag, where I reversed direction as soon as I realised I'd come across a current habitation of some sort.
Up in Clifton it took me a little while to work out that the picture of the Promenade I was trying to reproduce was taken from the viewpoint I'd thought, it was just that the Alderman's fountain was moved from the top of Bridge Valley Road to the other side of the promenade in 1987, so trying to use it as my initial landmark wasn't very helpful!
Finally I swung past the Society of Merchant Venturers, who presumably still own most of Clifton, having bought the entire manor, including Clifton Down, in 1676, and I imagine aren't in much danger of running out of money. That's true to their motto: indocilis pauperiem pati is apparently from the Odes of Horace, and translates as "will not learn to endure poverty"...
Oooh, it opens. However, it also looks like it closes fairly solidly and can be bolted from the outside. And it felt just a tad like there might be someone inside. So I didn't venture in.
I imagine this alarm was last connected to anything during the tunnel's last commercial incarnation, where is was a shooting range for a Bristol gun club. Not even the lights are wired up these days. Or the water.
