Tagged: water
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.
Strange little pond, yes? I think this may be a "cart dip" pond, used for rehydrating the wheels of old carts and carriages, which apparently kept things working better. Not sure on the details, though.
We'll leave today's wander with a snap of the Patent Slip. I wonder if the newer timber closest to the camera is the greenheart that they're renewing some of the structure with? Hardy stuff, as Wikipedia says:
The wood is extremely hard and strong, so hard that it cannot be worked with standard tools. It is durable in marine conditions, so it is used to build docks and other structures... The Fram and the Endurance, made famous in the polar expeditions of Amundsen and Shackleton, were the two strongest wooden ships ever constructed and were sheathed in greenheart to prevent them from being crushed by ice.
I took advantage of a rare recent day where it wasn't tipping down with rain to get away from my desk on a lunchtime workday and head up to Clifton Village. I'd hoped to snap a reproduction of historical photo which I'd worked out had been taken from the Suspension Bridge, but the gods were not smiling on me. Still, taking only a nice long lens with me worked out very well as the lovely haze of the day made more distant views quite dramatic...
If I'd really considered it, the fact that there was a bloke in high vis standing on the bit of the bridge I wanted to take a photograph of might have warned me what was going to happen...
This is almost the photo I wanted to take, but the historical photo I want to reproduce was definitely taken from further to my right, on the bridge, and you should still be able to see the remains of Clifton Bridge Station (hidden from here by the trees on the right) and the last bit of slipway of the Rownham Ferry (hidden by the prominent house in the foreground.) This snap is also a bit marred by the temporary safety fencing I had to shoot through.
Ah well, another day, I suppose.
It's been pretty dismal recently, weather-wise, so when Sarah called up to say that she and Vik had just left the swimming pool at the student union building up in Clifton, and would I like to join them for a trip to the Last Bookshop, also known as The £3 Bookshop, for reasons you can probably deduce, I leapt at the chance.
Not many photos on this walk, but I did manage to get down a little road I'd never been to before, basically just the access road to a car park at a block of flats, but it was on the map looking all tempting, so I figured I'd knock it off the list as we were passing.
This was basically the quick lunchtime jaunt I tried to do at the beginning of January, only this time I actually managed to get to roughly the viewpoint I'd been hoping for to recreate a historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
I did this walk about a month ago, but I've been a bit poorly and not really up to doing much in my spare time, and it's taken me this long to even face processing even these few photos. Hopefully normal service will be resumed at some point and I can carry on trying to walk any roads and paths that I need to do to make this project feel complete...
From Bristol's Lost City, by Clive Burlton, available from Bristol Books; photograph from the author's own collection.
(And extra credit goes to my parents for buying me the book for my birthday! Thanks!)
The Bristol International Exhibition site, presumably around 1914 or not long after. You can see the Rownham Ferry in use, too. I still find it pretty amazing that there used to be a busy ferry and a significant railway station on this little scrap of land that I just used to know as the grassy bit at the start of the towpath, let alone a replica of Bristol Castle!
Unlike my last attempt I successfully managed to get somewhere near the vantage point of the historic photo this time...
I should probably have tried to get it at high tide to make it a bit more comparable, but you can't have everything.
You can see the White City Allotments—those glints of light toward the middle are mostly reflections from greenhouses—where the "White City" of the Exhibition used to stand. There's still a glimpse or two of the railway line to Portishead to be seen, too, along with a vestige of the Rownham Ferry slipway.
Mostly though it's the modern things that stand out—the long line of flats along Paxton Drive, the curve of Brunel Way across the river, and the roof of Ashton Gate Stadium...
The Colonnade, the Rock House, St Vincent's Parade and the old landing stages for Campbell's paddle steamers. The leftover fruit of bygone boom years.
Another workday, another quick lunchtime trip to get me out of the house. This time my flimsy pretext is a tiny bit of Clifton Vale Close that I'd apparently not walked, and the fact that although I'd walked down Church Lane at least once before I still hadn't taken a single photo of it. Really I just fancied a mosey through Cliftonwood in the sunshine, with the promise of a coffee from Clifton Village at the top of the hill.
I used to live down there, in the block on this end, Portland Court. I recently found a photograph by the late local photographer George Gallop (he had a place on the Hotwell Road) of these Baltic Wharf flats being built, taken from a similar vantage point.
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...
There have been new plans put forward by the council for the Western Harbour Development The previous plans would have put a bridge in between here and the suspension bridge. I've not looked at the new ones yet.
I've always enjoyed the optical illusion that these houses are on stilts from this angle. In fact there's the Hotwell Road the National Express coach is on in between the houses at the back and the disused landing stage at the front, as you'll see in the next pic of the adjacent terrace.
The Campbell Brothers' White Funnel Fleet operated from the Hotwells landing stage up until relatively recently. Last week I bought an old timetable on eBay and popped it up on my blog for anyone who might be interested.
In 1965, the year of the timetable, there were regular sailings from here along the coast or over to Wales. You could go to Ilfracombe and Lundy Island, or head across to Barry, Penarth or Cardiff. All from within five minutes' walk of my front door.
This is probably the most popular spot to take photos of the bridge from this direction. I'd guess the large majority of photos of the Suspension Bridge are taken from the other side.
This is the point on the walk where I get to look at how far I've walked, by looking down on the towpath and seeing tiny things in the distance that I was right next to earlier, like the white navigation light you can just see toward the far end of the curving flood plain of the river down there.
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.
That reminds me; I must re-read Iain M Banks's Use of Weapons again. In the novel he used the name Size Isn't Everything for one of the Culture's General System Vehicles, a spacecraft approximately 80km long... In the Culture, spacecraft are sentient and Culture ships choose their own names, often ironically.
He we have something of the opposite size of craft.
You don't often see Entrance Lock cycle at this kind of tide, but a little boat like that doesn't need a lot of water in the river to manoeuvre.
Yes, okay, it's quite the challenge to spot the hand-made historic artifact in this picture. In the next pic I'll zoom in a bit.
There, hopefully you can see it now—the slipway of the last incarnation of the Rownham Ferry, in use from as early as the 12th century to 1932, when this particular slipway was last used.
There's not much to see at the moment, as the tide's a bit too high. I'm going to head over to the Tobacco Factory Market, meet some friends, do a crossword or two, and head back at lower tide.
Again, the slipway is easy to miss. I like these little barely-visible curiosities that hide such heritage. The site of the crossing moved around—it's fairly obvious it wasn't right here in the 12th century, for example, because the river was only diverted into the New Cut, which the ferry crosses here, in the early 1800s. Earlier it was further downstream.
Now the tide's lower, we can see the end of the slipway we looked at earlier poking out from the Somerset side. According this article from the Bristol & Avon
Family History Society:
In 1793 the ferry was identified as being used by many passengers to "cross the river at Rownham ferry and walk to the sweet and wholesome village of Ashton to eat strawberries and cream"
At an earlier site, the ferry was mentioned in the Proceedings in the Court of the Star Chamber in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII after a dispute between a new competitor and the existing ferry, which was run by St Augustine's Abbey. Presumably the crossing was used to get to and from the abbey property at Abbots Pool, which I've actually swum in, from the Abbey, now Bristol Cathedral.
And here's the picture that inspired this little local visit today. A week or so back I was browsing the boxes of books at Rachel's and Michael's Antiques on Princess VIctoria Street, and flipping through their collection of Reece Winstone books. Winstone's famous Bristol As It Was series are an amazing documentary source created by a man who loved both photography and Bristol and effectively became Bristol's foremost documentary photographer for decades. A lot more of Bristol's history is visible today because of him.
In the Bristol As It Was 1939 - 1914 book I saw this picture of the Rownham Ferry. Unfortunately the book was a first edition and priced at £20, so I ordered a cheaper edition from an independent dealer in Stockport when I got home! (Let's consider that as me leaving the rare first edition for the true connoisseurs, rather than just being cheap.)
Here we see the ferry just five days before its closure on the last day of 1932. Looking closely, it seems to be perhaps operating as a reaction ferry, with the boat tethered to a static line across the river, and the ferryman using the rudder to turn the boat and use the power of the flowing water to shuttle the boat from side to side. Clever!
Photo © Reece Winstone Archive. (I recommend buying the books if you like old photos of Bristol. They're amazing!)
I wanted to have a wander along to the Tobacco Factory Market for some shopping, and checking the map for any leftover nearby streets I noticed a tiny curve of road on the way into the modern flats at Paxton Drive that it didn't look like I'd walked down before. I wouldn't take me too far out of my way, so I decided to head there first and then across to North Street to get my groceries and a coffee...
Work on the New Cut, this man-made diversion of the river to allow the harbour to float free of the tide, was officially started on 1st May 1804 and finished on 1st May 1809, with something of a party:
On 1 May 1809 the docks project was certified as complete and a celebratory dinner was held on Spike Island for a thousand of the navvies, navigational engineers who had worked on the construction, at which "two oxen, roasted whole, a proportionate weight of potatoes, and six hundredweight of plum pudding" were consumed, along with a gallon of strong beer for each man. When the beer ran out a mass brawl between English and Irish labourers turned into a riot which had to be suppressed by the press gang.
At some point, the Council say that the Chocolate path will finally be repaired and I can at last add one of my favourite paths in Bristol to my One Mile Matt project.
Here's hoping.
I noticed I had a few things on my "potential wanders" list that could all be done relatively close to home, and in a fairly straight line, so I set off at lunchtime to recreate a photo of a now-defunct pub, wander behind a Spar (which turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, but I admit it's a low bar) and spend some time browsing in Dreadnought Books before coming home via a coffee from Spoke & Stringer, a little diversion up Gasworks Lane and a tiny bit of the Rownham Mead estate I'd somehow previously skipped.
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.
