Tagged: shrub
Ticking Off a Pocket of Paths in Leigh Woods
03 Jun 2022
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.
Guessing this is a polite hint from the golf club. In my mind's eye I can see an irate greenkeeper chasing a couple of mountain bikers in his golf buggy.
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 rarely come in this way to Leigh Woods—it's basically the car entrance, and I almost always walk here. On those few occasions I've driven here, I've mostly parked on North Road near my usual pedestrian entrance through sheer habit, rather than driving in and using the official car park that's actually in the woods.
There's a viewpoint "Quarry 5 Viewpoint" marked somewhere along here on OpenStreetMap. I think pretty much all the viewpoints on this stretch have gradually been overcome by forest growth. Here you can just make out the cliffs on the far side of the gorge through trees.
Possibly fenced off to stop people trying to clamber or mountain bike over it and cause more damage before it can be rebuilt?
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.
A Quick Swing Past Ashton Court
05 Jun 2022
Another day not dissimilar to my last wander: I'm feeling a bit tired and rather than just moping around the house I thought I'd find some tiny bit of somewhere that I'd not yet walked and get outdoors. This time I headed for the Tobacco Factory Market in Bedminster, as I often do, but went the long way around via Ashton Court Mansion as I knew there were some footpaths and a small section of road I'd not ticked off up there. Finishing all the Ashton Court footpaths will be quite a long job, but you've got to start somewhere...
I did feel rather better by the time I got home, and, pretty much astoundingly given the weather forecast, managed to avoid the rain completely.
I like the sound of "Flax Bourton". I keep on meaning to dust off my bike; maybe a trip along there would be an interesting day trip. Might want to make sure I can still ride comfortably before I try a ten-mile round trip, though...
Hard to do this tree justice, as it was both wider and taller than the widest angle of my camera, and any further back the fence gets in the way.
Of course, if I'd brought a full-frame camera with a wide-angle lens, this is exactly the moment when a peregrine falcon would land on a branch at the same time a magnificent stag wandered past in the middle distance. You never have the right lens...
I do enjoy the bits of my walks where I can look back and see Hotwells, or at least the higher bits surrounding Hotwells.
Alan Barber, late campaigner for public parks and green spaces, helped design this rose garden at Ashton Court, and it was dedicated to him in 2008.
Trasparenza, by Andrea Greenlees, originally built for Burning Man in 2016. It has transparent benches inside, but it looked a bit of a tight squeeze, so I left the children of the family that arrived a couple of minutes later to it. They seemed to enjoy exploring. There's a view from the inside on Andrea's Instagram.
Nipping Up the Zig Zag to the Shops
19 Aug 2023
It's been a long while since I did one of these walks.
I'm thinking of finishing up the project by walking one or two last bits of road, thus being able to declare with all honesty that I've done my best to walk every public road within my mile (and quite a few alleyways besides.) As a prelude, and just because I felt like it, I decided to drag out the camera and GPS on this little wander to the local shops.
My exercise for the day is to be a short sharp shock: first we descend down Hinton Lane to the Hotwell Road, then I'm going to ascend the Zig Zag, and possibly die in the process. My fitness has suffered recently because although I've been keeping my step count up it's mostly been on the fairly flat commute to work and back, so hills are coming as a bit of a shock to the system at the moment.
From near the top of the Zig Zag you can look down a couple of levels and see how vertiginous it is.
The reward at the top is the viewing platform of the Suspension Bridge, always busy with tourists.
I was actually planning to take an unexpected short-cut through a pub as an interesting little diversion on this wander, but sadly the pub was closed—I suppose before midday it's a bit of a reach to expect any pub to be open, even on a Saturday—so I headed for the shops instead. I'll have to do the short-cut trip one afternoon...
First I browsed the books at Rachel's & Michael's Antiques on Princess Victoria Street, where I bought CFW Dening's Old Pubs of Bristol as it mentions Hotwells a few times, then I grabbed my lunch from Parsons Bakery. There didn't seem to be anything new or interesting to snap along the way, so we'll now skip to the last couple of photos I took on my way home...
One of many exemplars of the sorry state of the historic cast iron lamp posts of Clifton Village. I get the feeling that the Council wish they'd all just rust away so that they can be replaced by cheap ugly lighting rather than needing any kind of maintenance.
On that somewhat sour note, I headed home before the few spots of rain I felt became anything more severe.
Leigh Woods Walk
14 Mar 2021
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 :)
Here's an interesting little place—not that I'm athetic enough to climb into it like the graffiti artists who've clearly been at work. This little disused quarry was a police firing range for a while, and the last time I wandered into it, perhaps ten years ago—I happened to walk past while it was unlocked for some reason—you could still see the piles of old tyres and other ricochet-deadening material that would have lain behind the targets.
On my long walks on this route, I'm always grateful to see this, I think the only set of steps anyway on the towpath, making them a very distinctive marker for the point in my journey I leave the towpath, turn into Leigh Woods, and start heading back towards home, albeit in a long, roundabout and uphill way.
