Tagged: highland
I was just about starting to feel better—the antibiotics seemed to have kicked in for my dental issues, and it had been some days since I'd left the house, and I was at last starting to get itchy feet. So, a wander. But where? Well, there were a few industrial bits near Winterstoke Road in the Ashton/Ashton Vale areas of Bristol that needed walking. I knew they were likely to be quite, well, unattractive, frankly. So why not do them while I wasn't feeling exactly 100% myself? Maybe it would fit my mood. Hopefully you're also in the mood for a bit of post-industrial wasteland, for that's what some of this feels like...
Then, at the last minute, I thought again about the Bristol International Exhibition—I've got a book about it on the way now—and that gave me another goal, which could just about be said to be in the same direction, and I decided to walk significantly further than my normal 1-mile limit and try recreating another historical photo...
Sadly I don't know much about the Ashton area; it's just on the edges of my mile and I rarely have cause to go there. It's brimming with history, I'm sure: the whole South Bristol area rapidly developed from farmland to coal mines to factories to its current interesting mixture of suburbs and industrial work over the last few hundred years. As a more working class area less attention was paid to it by historians, at least historically-speaking, than the Georgian heights of Clifton, and much of it has been knocked down and reinvented rather than listed and preserved. I see here and there some of this lack is being addressed, but I'm afraid I'll be very light on the history myself on this wander, as most of my usual sources aren't throwing up their normal reams of information as when I point them at Clifton, Hotwells or the old city.
These are some hills I'm not heading for today, but I love the distant view of Dundry from Hotwells. The silhouetted church towards the left is St MIchael's Church, Dundry, whose tower was built in 1481.
The other towers around Dundry have more recent heritage. I believe Dundry East transmitter still sends out the analogue signal for BBC Radio 4, and lets me listen to The Archers on an old Roberts radio when I'm doing my cleaning on a Sunday morning. Some bits of my life are still quite old-fashioned.
I nearly didn't take this photo, having snapped this view so many times before, but I do find it almost completely irresistible.
I've often wondered about writing some kind of neural-computing based app that could look through all of my photos for snaps of this view and mash them all together into a time-lapse, or something, but that would be quite the project.
As if to prove that you can find beauty in the most unexpected of places, this is what happens when you turn around at the arse end of nowhere.
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.
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...
This is almost the photo I wanted to take, but the historical photo I want to reproduce was definitely taken from further to my right, on the bridge, and you should still be able to see the remains of Clifton Bridge Station (hidden from here by the trees on the right) and the last bit of slipway of the Rownham Ferry (hidden by the prominent house in the foreground.) This snap is also a bit marred by the temporary safety fencing I had to shoot through.
Ah well, another day, I suppose.
Lunchtime Reproduction (of an old photo...)
17 Jan 2022
This was basically the quick lunchtime jaunt I tried to do at the beginning of January, only this time I actually managed to get to roughly the viewpoint I'd been hoping for to recreate a historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
I did this walk about a month ago, but I've been a bit poorly and not really up to doing much in my spare time, and it's taken me this long to even face processing even these few photos. Hopefully normal service will be resumed at some point and I can carry on trying to walk any roads and paths that I need to do to make this project feel complete...
There's a couple on the balcony taking a selfie in this direction. I wonder if I've been immortalised as a few pixels in the background of their photo...
I think this may be the "avonmouth monster"; a plume of outflow from the works at Avonmouth. I took a photo of it some years back and asked BBC weatherman Ian Fergusson about it in the comments on this blog post—I'd recently done a tiny segment for his show "Wild Weather of the West" on how to photograph lightning—and that's what he said it was. This looks suspiciously similar and is in the right direction.
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...
There have been new plans put forward by the council for the Western Harbour Development The previous plans would have put a bridge in between here and the suspension bridge. I've not looked at the new ones yet.
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.
This is the point on the walk where I get to look at how far I've walked, by looking down on the towpath and seeing tiny things in the distance that I was right next to earlier, like the white navigation light you can just see toward the far end of the curving flood plain of the river down there.
