Tagged: the-ashton
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.
I don't think I noticed this when passing the Ashton pub the last couple of times, but this time a family emerged from it as I was walking in the other direction. It doesn't lead anywhere spectacular, but it was a footpath I'd managed to miss, and the start of it is pleasingly intriguing, at least.
Bower Ashton is an interesting little area just south of the river from me—in fact, the Rownham Ferry used to take people over from Hotwells to Bower Ashton, operating from at least the twelfth century to around the 1930s.
It's a strangely contradictory little area, with a cluster of old and new houses sandwiched in between the busy A-roads and significantly more industrial area of Ashton and the bucolic country estate of Ashton court roughly east to west, and also between Somerset and Bristol, north to south.
I've been around here before, mostly poking around Bower Ashton's arguably most well-known bit, the Arts faculty campus of the University of the West of England, but I'd missed at least Parklands Road and Blackmoors Lane, so I initially planned just to nip across briefly and wander down each in turn. On a whim, though, I texted my friends Sarah and Vik in case they were out and about, and ended up diverting to the Tobacco Factory Sunday market first, to grab a quick flat white with them, extending my journey a fair bit.
To start with, though, I nipped to a much more local destination, to see something that you can't actually see at all, the Gridiron...
(I also used this wander as a test of the cameras in my new phone. I finally upgraded after a few years, and the new one has extra, separate wide and telephoto lenses compared to the paltry single lens on my old phone. Gawd. I remember when speed-dial was the latest innovation in phones...)
I'm not sure I've ever walked or even driven past the Ashton before, and it's only a mile away from me—in fact, my mile radius line divides it roughly in half. Tripadvisor suggests that its solid 3-star review average is made up of people having either one-star or five-star experiences, which is sometimes the hallmark of a great place that's happy to be rude to idiots...
Maybe this is the place to have a celebratory meal when I finally decide I've actually walked all the roads within my mile...
It's got the grazing field at the front and school playing fields at the back, and the road it's on isn't manic. Does this count as a Somerset "country" pub I can walk to?
This used to be called The Dovecote, but was gutted by fire in 2014 and re-opened under the new name the following year.