Tagged: the
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.
Right, back to Clifton Village for a coffee and some lunch to take home. I see the one way system—brought in as a social distancing measure—is still in place.
A Swing of the Plimsoll Bridge
24 Apr 2022
I was originally going to head over to the Ashton area to see if I'd missed any bits around the football stadium—and also to grab some lunch from the Tobacco Factory Market—but in the end I got a little distracted by having accidentally chosen exactly the right time to see the Plimsoll Bridge swing on one of the first busy days of Spring, where a lot of pleasure trips tend to head out down the Avon (and possibly the New Cut) from Hotwells.
In the end I mostly snapped that, and just a couple of photos from the Ashton area where I grabbed some lunch but didn't do any new exploring.
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.
I first heard of Clerihews in the Times crossword: The Clerihew is:
a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
The reason it's relevant to this plaque on a house just around the corner from mine is that the very first Clerihew was written about Sir Humphry Davy:
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
(Sir Humphry is indeed credited with having been the first to isolate sodium, six years after moving out of this house...)
The bench at the top of Clifton Vale doesn't really have a view, and it's squeezed into an awkward little corner in the tight dogleg turn up to Goldney Avenue. On the plus side, Clifton Vale is very steep and many people are grateful for the opportunity it provides for a breather.
I last used it when showing my friend Heather the way back to her hotel in Berkeley Square after a meal in the Pump House. It's a fairly direct route to take, but even a local like me who's used to the hills around here can feel the need for a short rest here before pressing on to the heights of Clifton.
There's been some commotion on Nextdoor about the recent appearance of this sign. Lots of people who have been letting their dogs off their leads in the churchyard for decades have been rather up in arms. I'm not sure there's actually much danger of the rozzers issuing ASBOs or fines to the locals for that kind of infraction, though.
From the window of the community bookshop. A book I'm vaguely thinking of writing involves the Tarot, and I'm a little tempted to go on this.
With a special Platinum Jubilee celebration on offer, too. I imagine The Mall Gardens will do that rather well.
The "Brigstowe Village Band" is a whimsical name. Brigstow—the bridge at the meeting point—is the origin of the modern "Bristol". Apparently they're "modelled on the village bands of Thomas Hardy’s day when local musicians played for all the local gatherings and celebrations."
On the way back home, it's always worth a poke around the book section at the front of Rachel's and Michael's Antiques.
Also always worth a look, of course, is Audrey Hepburn, who seems to be peering at us from the right-hand end.
And on that somewhat random note, it's time to end our wander. I headed back home to tuck into a bit of work-supplied Easter egg, which was an unexpected bonus of being physically in the office last week!
Leigh Woods Purple Path
12 Mar 2022
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...
"Swing bridge machinery by Sir William Arrol & Co. Ltd": Sir William was knighted for his commitment to his work on both the Forth Bridge and the replacement Tay Bridge, erected following the loss of the previous bridge in the great Tay Bridge Disaster. He was also responsible for knocking up some other little bridges around the country, like london's Tower Bridge, to pick an example...
My friend Sarah made a podcast episode about Sylvia Crowe (credited bottom right on the plaque) and her development of the landscape in this area, with Wendy Tippett, a local landscape architect. It's a great listen if you're familiar with the area, and explains all sorts of things, including the PPILA after Sylvia Crowe's name on the plaque: Past President, Institute of Landscape Artists.
In Which We Begin and End with Love
05 Mar 2022
I had a lot to get done around the house, so as soon as I heard there might be a shiny new piece of street art near me, under the Cumberland Basin flyovers, I immediately decided that was all the excuse I needed to set off on a round-the-harbour lunchtime walk to get some fresh air and see if I could spot it. So, here's a circular wander that takes in graffiti, boats, wildlife and graffiti again...
Not much change since the last time I saw her, but certainly a heck of a difference from the start of the "refit".
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!
The blurb for The Cuckoo Cage sounds fun:
In this unique experiment, twelve authors have been tasked with resurrecting that tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes, willing to bring the fight back to British shores and to more progressive causes.
But I'd probably take issue with the experiment's claimed uniqueness, given that it sounds virtually the same concept as 1991's Temps. Still, I'll be interested to read it and I snapped this to remind myself that I might want to get a ticket for the launch.
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.
This sounded like a fragment of poetry to me. All Of Ending Bicycles, perhaps a work by Keats?
A Door, a Square, a Few Night Shots
04 Dec 2021
I didn't take many pictures on this quite long wander, partly because Lisa and I wandered across to Bedminster via Bower Ashton, which I've snapped quite a lot of on the last couple of walks, and also because we lost the light fairly quickly, though spending a half-hour drinking mulled wine in the Ashton might have had a little to do with that...
Before we left Hotwells I wanted to visit a door I'd heard about on Cornwallis Crescent and also take a little look at a couple of houses in Dowry Square to consider the 1960s regeneration of Hotwells.
It's possible I had a bit too much alcohol—Lisa and I stopped off for another mulled wine at Corks on Wapping Wharf (best mulled wine in Bristol; they use ruby port), then had one in the Rose of Denmark and one for the road (in Lisa's case, the bus down the Portway back to Shirehampton) in the Merchant's Arms, which I must visit more often. They had the fire going and were as welcoming as ever.
Anyway. After waving Lisa off I tried to buy fish & chips but was stymied by the Hotwells Fish Bar not being open, so ended up in RED, which certainly has some of the strongest branding on the Hotwell Road.
I seem to remember something about rats being driven mad by an experiment that saw them locked in a bright red room, but the staff here seemed calm enough. A quotidian shot to end on, but a genuine slice of everyday life, I suppose.
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...)
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.
Recreating a Loxton Drawing on a Lunchtime Jaunt
05 Nov 2021
I did do a much longer wander earlier in the week, but that'll take me some time to process (and cast a plethora of photos into the "out-takes" pile!) In the meantime, here's my lunchtime jaunt, taken to give myself a break from doing the company bookkeeping to send to my accountant so the taxman doesn't sling me in chokey.
I've recently bought a slightly creased secondhand copy of Redcliffe Press's 1992 collection of Samuel Loxton drawings, Loxton's Bristol: The city's Edwardian years in black and white. It's a nice selection of Bristol Library's collection of the drawings. I'd noticed a drawing of 25 Royal York Crescent, a house I pass quite often, so I thought I'd wander up the crescent on the way to pick up some lunch and try to reproduce it.
On the way back I took a few photos of Clifton Hill Bank as the crowdfunder to make quite a lot of it into a wildflower meadow has just hit its target, so I figured some "before" shots might be a good investment for the future...
Loxton drawing from Bristol Library collection via Loxton's Bristol, Redcliffe Press, 1995 ISBN 1 872971 86 5.