Tagged: mountain
The Gridiron and Bower Ashton Part Two
03 Dec 2021
On my last wander, to Bower Ashton, I was intending to knock Blackmoors Lane off my list "to-do" list, but got a bit diverted. I also took a little look into the history of the Gridiron, once a cheaper alternative to dry dock that was nestled just south of North Entrance Lock.
Today I had to go to send a parcel off somewhere, so I decided on going to the North Street Post Office via Blackmoors Lane. I didn't have much intention of anything else, but as luck would have it I walked out both at low tide and also as some lockkeepers seemed to be having a bit of a training session, and one of the more senior people was (a) happy to answer a few random questions on the Gridiron and (b) actually knew a lot about it, as Gridiron maintenance had been one of his jobs, more than twenty years ago...
Yes, having compared it with old photos and the 1946 aerial view I posted on Sunday I'm sure that that's the end of the gridiron, all 200 feet of which is apparently still there beneath the silt.
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.
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.
I did take a lot of slightly different angles, clambering around on the slippery slopes of Bedminster Down and having the occasional entanglement with trees. I think this shows pretty much the same view as the historical photo, or at least as close as you can get by wandering around on the ground in about the right place today.
It was nice to be able to find it, and I've never walked to Bedminster Down before. And it's a nice palate cleanser after all that rather dreary industrial stuff, anyway...
And that's the note I'll leave things on, as it was already getting a bit dark for photography, so I mostly plodded my weary way home without any further snapping. At more than 9km it's not my longest wander ever, but it's about twice as long as the average, so I may have overdone it...
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.
Inflating in the field behind Ashton Court mansion, by the looks of it, the usual venue for the Balloon Fiesta.