Tagged: meadow
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.
Though this isn't the allegedly main-ish road I was trying to find, so I didn't pop through it.
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 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.
To the left is the edge of the golf course. I'm looking to wander along the edge and the behind the railway, which is behind those trees.
I think I'm pretty much a mile away from my house right here. Nice of someone to erect a marker.
I'm reminded why I like living in Hotwells. In a pretty leisurely hour's walk I can be in the countryside, basically. Or in the centre of town, or Temple Meads station, or shopping on Whiteladies Road, or on North Street... There's a lot of possibility, but it's generally a very quiet area to live in.
So, I finished off my route along the uncompleted sections of the paths, and by then felt a bit lost, with all the turning around and circling. I headed in what I hoped was the right direction, wondering if I'd spot a landmark, and then realised that the giant hill I was right next to was the man-made iron age fort of Stokeleigh Camp, and of course I knew where I was. D'oh. Sometimes you really can't see the wood for the trees.
I was put into something of an altered state by the little pilgrimage to this random little area of the woods and my backwards-and-forwards wandering. This kind of state has been used, apparently, as a form of divination, which is something I've been researching a bit recently.
It took me a while to find the right term. At first I thought that divination through walking along my map routes might be cartomancy, by comparison with cartography, but of course the "cart" comes from the Latin for "card", so cartomancy covers divination by cards, like the Tarot. Then I thought perhaps geomancy, what with it being somewhat geographical, but the "geo" bit is "earth" in Greek, and geomancy covers, as Chambers says, "divination by shapes formed, eg when earth is thrown down onto a surface".
In the end I tripped over the right name: ambulomancy—"any of various forms of divination that involve walking, often in circles", according to Wictionary. Lexico puts its appearance as early 19th century.
Of course, presumably one actually has to divine something to be an ambulomancer, and the main thing I was divining was that there was coffee and and sandwich in my future now I knew I was near the Leigh Woods exit that would take me across the bridge to Clifton Village.
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 :)
