Tagged: groundcover
I mostly went out to hang out with my friends Sarah and Vik in Bedminster, but along the way I thought I'd take a closer look at something a little nearer home: the last crossing point of the Rownham Ferry.
The Tobacco Factory, Bedminster's will-known theatre and bar, bought a farm in 2018 and now has a farm shop attached. always trying to be innovative, bought a farm in 2018 and now has a farm shop attached. I sometimes pop in on a Sunday, though it's the Sunday market that pops up in the back yard that actually lures me over there.
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...)
See? Livestock. Although the zoom on my phone camera really does show why people are still dragging big lenses and cameras with large sensors around with them.
I'm not sure if this is my nearest cow—there are some in Leigh Woods, too—but it's still quite reassuring to know that it only takes about a mile for me to be next to some livestock. This is far further than it would have been even a hundred years ago, when there were still cowsheds and a slaughterhouse behind the Pump House (as opposed to the Rownham Mead housing estate) and when the Cumberland Basin still had sheep pens along the side...
I was really just busking my route at this point, and finding a handy entrance to Ashton Court I figured that wandering back through the estate was a good plan.
No idea what's through here. Let's go take a look. Is there a way to get back to Parklands Road? I don't even know if you can get into Parklands Road from this end...
Well, it doesn't seem to lead into the school, and presumably it leads somewhere...
