Tagged: seabird
Nowhere New
10 Dec 2020
I didn't have any time to find a new place to go today, so I'm treading old ground here. I did buy a tub of duck food from Amazon last week and today I remembered to take a little bagful of it with me on my trip to Imagine That coffee, and spent a few minutes feeding the marina slipway ducks on the way back. This is a Bristol tradition I've seen other people doing many times, but never tried myself. It was quite genteel until the seagulls cottoned on, then it became something of a brawl.
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.
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.
Another day, another coffee. I think I may have knocked a tiny footpath in Baltic Wharf from my list of leftover paths in the area, but mostly this walk was about getting out into the crisp February cold and enjoying the walk. On the way I posted a letter at 13 Dowry Parade (home of a surgeon called Willam Falls back 1830, according to Pigot's Directory of Gloucestershire...) and pondered the strange duality of Dowry Parade and Hotwell Road, then wandered through the Dowry Parade end of Cumberland Piazza, enjoying the clean lines of the glyph graff, before taking the causeway route past a Cumberland Basin empty of water but full of seagulls, to make my way south of the harbour.
The basin was being sluiced when I walked over the causeway, so I got to snap a few excited seagulls, some from above.
Brief Jaunt to the not-so-Hot Well
13 Feb 2021
It's been very cold the last few days, so seeing as it was low tide at a convenient afternoon hour, I just wandered out to see if I could see the hot well steaming. I've been told that you sometimes can, on a cold day, but today, as with every other day I've tried, there was nothing in evidence.
It may be that the emergent spring has already filtered through too much cold river silt by the time it hits the surface these days, or even that it's running cooler than it used to. But perhaps I've just been unlucky.
One Albermarle Row, Granby Green and... People
12 Mar 2021
I was browsing some historical photos the other day, and came across "Rear of Unspecified House" in the Bristol Archives' John Trelawny Ross collection, and immediately recognised it as being the back of 1 Albermarle Row, just around the corner from me. I've not had much time to research the history of this odd little addition to Albermarle Row, or what happened to 1-4 Cumberland Place, number 4 of which used to be attached to the side of 1 Albermarle Row, but it was interesting to look at old maps for a few minutes and work out what used to be where.
That all connects with the little local bit of land at Granby Green, too, as it used to be numbers 1-3 Cumberland Place. There was something of a planning battle over Granby Green, and I've included an old edition of Hotwells & Cliftonwood News that I found online, a copy of which would have been popped through my letterbox at the time.
I was also inspired by some old pictures of Hotwell Road to try to put a few more people in my pictures, though I set my pre-focus a couple of extra metres out from normal to make sure I didn't get too close to anyone!
Bedminster Trip for New Walking Shoes
26 Feb 2022
I needed to buy new walking shoes—my old ones were squeaking and it was driving me up the wall—so I ordered some for collection from Taunton Leisure on East Street in Bedminster, and decided to make picking them up an official wander.
I didn't cover any new ground within my mile, but I did take advantage of the trip to take in a few interesting things just outside my normal radius, mostly New Gaol-related. Along the way there are a couple of sanitation-related diversions, including a visit to a rare manhole cover. You can hardly wait, I can tell!
I took a long lens with me today in case the cormorants were around; I've been meaning to try taking a better snap of them for a while. Here's one on a buoy that seems to have "hosting cormorants" as its only purpose. There's often one there, anyway.
And there's often also a cormorant and some other birds hanging out on the end of this pontoon at the slipway near the Nova Scotia, too.
Easter Monday Gardens and Flowers
18 Apr 2022
I didn't really set out with a theme of flowers and gardens in mind for this walk. I just fancied heading up to Clifton Village to get lunch. As it turned out, though, Spring was springing, so a minor theme emerged as I started off with the graveyard flowers of Hope Chapel and wandered up to see the beginnings of the new wildflower garden at Clifton Hill Meadow.
This little bugger had nicked an entire unopened chicken mayo sarnie from somewhere—possibly a distraction burglary at the nearby Co-Op—and at one point flew it up twenty feet and dropped it in order to break through the wrapper. Impressive, if violent.
Man on a Mission
17 Apr 2021
I went rather outside my area today, as I went to pick something up from the Warhammer shop on Wine Street (Games Workshop as-was, and before that I think perhaps a rare retail outlet for Her Majesty's Stationery Office? I may be mis-remembering...) Anyway, a friend of mine wanted something picking up and posting to him, so I figured I'd knock some streets off my list along the way.
I first headed for the St George's Road area, walking down the narrow Brandon Steps and finding some strange wall art on Brandon Steep, then headed to the Old City via Zed Alley. The Warhammer shop visit was friendly and efficient, and, mission accomplished, I treated myself to a sausage roll and a flat white from Spicer + Cole, to take away and eat in Queen Square with its current decoration of hearts. I finished off with a detour up Park Street, looking out for St John's Conduit markers, before finally crossing Brandon Hill on the way home.
Quite a long wander, all told, and I'm a bit knackered today...
Leftovers with Lisa
01 May 2021
I didn't get to all the little leftover streets around the northeastern part of my area in today's wander, but I definitely knocked a few off the list, plus Lisa and I enjoyed the walk, and didn't get rained on too badly. We spotted the hotting-up of Wisteria season, checked out Birdcage Walk (both old and new), ventured onto the wrong side of the tracks1 and generally enjoyed the architecture.
1 Well, technically we probably shouldn't have been on the grounds of those retirement flats, but nobody started chasing us around the garden with a Zimmer frame
