Tagged: wood
I hadn't really planned to go out for a wander yesterday; I just got the urge and thought "why not?" (Well, the weather forecast was one possible reason, but I managed to avoid the rain, luckily.)
I wanted to finish off the A369—as it turns out I may still have a small section to go, but I've now walked the bulk of it out to my one-mile radius—and also a few random tracks in Leigh Woods. I'm still not really sure that I'm going to walk them all, especially after discovering today that "the map is not the territory" applies even more in the woods, where one of the marked tracks on the map wasn't really that recognisable as a track in real life... I'm glad I'd programmed the route into the GPS in advance!
Anyway. A pleasant enough walk, oddly bookended, photographically at least, by unusual vehicles. Leigh Woods was fairly busy, especially the section I'd chosen, which was positively dripping with teenage schoolkids with rah accents muttering opprobrium about the Duke of Edinburgh. I'm presuming the harsh remarks were more about taking part in his award scheme than the late Consort himself, but I didn't eavesdrop enough to be certain...
I'm not sure what's being delivered to the lock-keepers' house, but it looks like they'll probably all be a lot happier afterwards.
I don't think I've ever been next to these tracks when a train's gone down. I've sometimes seen it from the other side of the river, though. You can read a bit about the nearby disused station here; this used to be a passenger line, but it's freight-only now.
At some point I should dig back through my photos and see if I snapped this frame when it was first left locked to these railings as a full, complete bike.
I went off the beaten track onto something more overgrown and ended up with a closer view of the railway.
I passed some of a team of what looked like intrepid volunteer litter-pickers on my way up the hill, kitted out with borrowed Bristol Waste litter-picking tools. Sad, but I suppose there's always a balance between people leaving their crap behind and other people picking it up.
I was headed into town to return RA Gilbert's biography of AE Waite to the library and along the way I noticed that Dreadnought had finished their refurbishment, but wouldn't be open until midday. That left me some time to kill, so I bimbled around the old St Augustine's/Gaunt's area for a while, then headed up Park Street for a coffee and a snack to eat on Brandon Hill before heading home the way I'd came so I could pop in and buy a pamphlet on the Hot Well I'd been interested in for a while.
I imagine this is the house whose owners also own the plot with planning permission; it seems to be the end of their back garden.
I could also do with a few of the "ANTI FOG LOZENGES" from the bottle at the front. This is the always-interesting window of Bristol Brocante.
A brocante in France is basically a flea market; the purported etymology I've seen is the Dutch word brok, meaning a piece or fragment.
Hurrah! Dreadnought are back after their refurb. I purchased the excellent pamphlet The Bristol Hotwell by Vincent Waite.
Though what caught my eye was the barely-visible slogan on the side wall in the middle of the picture: "I DID MY FIRST GRAFFITI HERE WAY TOO LONG AGO".
Anyway. Then I popped along the walkway to return the biography of AE Waite I've just finished, and to discover if the library's reference section had re-opened yet. It hadn't.
Something tells me that this side passage that leads through to the side door of the chapel has been here quite some time.
This may be the least salubrious bit of the Old City. End of the alleyway behind Toni and Guy, just behind the back of the Greenhouse on Park Street. The most glamorous thing I passed was two hairdressers having a fag.
Speaking of Toni and Guy, I guess the salon used to be a Halifax. Given the glue remnants, it seems a newer plate has fallen off at some point, revealing a bit of history.
I really only took the GPS and camera on a "just in case" basis, as I knew I was only going for a coffee in Greville Smyth Park along a well-trodden path this lunchtime. Still, I saw a few new things along the way, so I figured it was worth uploading the handful of photos I took...
When I passed the (then-empty) fencing back in March I wondered what this would turn out to be. I had no idea it would be a miniature nature reserve...
According to the Friends Of Greville Smyth (FROGS!) Facebook page it's a hedgehog oasis, which is rather sweet.
I see from the Facebook group that it was Rich from Hopper Coffee—the little coffee van I was visiting today—who first started the building of the pond, after finding dehydrated hedgehogs suffering in the park. It looks like it then became a group effort with several volunteers and donations of materials. Nice.
Lisa had a couple of hours to spare before going up in a hot air balloon (exciting!) so we went for a quick local walk, revisiting a bit of Cliftonwood we've seen before, exploring the secret garden I'd visited before that I thought she'd enjoy (I didn't take any new photos there) and then pushing on to another garden, Cherry Garden. Last time we passed this way, I'd noticed the gate, but we hadn't gone in as I'd assumed it was private. I'd since found it on CHIS's list of communal gardens in Clifton, so I wanted to have a look inside this time, and try to figure out whether it was private-communal or public, and possibly Council-owned, like several of the other gardens in Clifton.
Using boots and shoes as flowerpots is a bit of a Cliftonwood signature, it seems.
I'm assuming it doesn't get opened much, or there'd be a little more pruning going on. Still, very pretty for a garage...
We've also seen Sydney Row, Upper Sydney Street and Sydney Garages on previous wanders.
Mosaic also seems to be a bit of a Cliftonwood feature. We've seen some on Ambra Vale, on Argyle Place, just around the corner here on the White Hart Steps, set into the wall just a bit further up the hill and of course at the entrance to Saint Peter's House.
Someone clearly put some good work in on the gate, but thirteen years of weather has taken its toll.
This is tacked up in the entrance to St Peter's House. This was once the location of St Peter's Church, demolished in 1938 to make way for the flats.
I imagine Woodwell Cottage and Avon Cottage might be quite hard to find for delivery drivers, so they've provided an extra hint.
I'm not sure it would go well in my living room, but if this lamp takes your fancy, it's in the window of Relics furniture shop on St George's Road.
A snappy little trip up the Zig Zag to the shops. It's a steep old route, the Zig Zag, going from just over river level to about the height of the suspension bridge (101 metres) in a compact switchback of a footpath.
I was too busy struggling to breathe to take many snaps of the actual Zig Zag (I've been trying to make it up all the way without stopping the last few times, but I've not quite managed it yet). I did at least take a few snaps either side on this quick lunchtime jaunt to fetch coffee (Coffee #1) and a sarnie (Parsons) from Clifton Village...
It's an untidy stack, but an interesting one. This is one of the basement windows of Granby House, on the corner of Hope Chapel Hill.
I will always enjoy the fact that Brunel looks out from this window. Have I ever noticed the smaller figure in the lower-left corner? Maybe it's new...
When climbing the Zig Zag it's helpful only to focus on where you are, rather than how far you've got left to go.
Okay, not much in the way of actual pasture to be had in Bedminster these days, like most of Bristol, but I did take advantage of the current rather toasty weather in Bristol to go and sit under a tree in Greville Smyth Park to read a book for a while before firing up the GPS and taking a little detour around some back streets of Ashton and Bedminster rather than going straight to Coffee #1 for an espresso frappé. This is the first walk in a while where I've actually crossed off an entire new street (the frankly unexciting Carrington Road) as well as exploring a couple of back alleys, just because they were there, really. Along the way I spotted a few examples of graffiti of various qualities, including a live work-in-progress by SNUB23 on Ashton Road and the finished Six Sisters project on North Street.
With bonus transom. I thought I might have snapped the transom before, but I think I was thinking of this one.
This is the end-stop for the Brunel swing bridge. Looks like someone's been doing a bit of restoration. I didn't actually check to see if it still had "HERE LYETH I K BRUNEL" carved on the back by some wag; I did at some point in the past...
The far east of the intersection of my one-mile radius and Bedminster, anyway. I was feeling a bit tired this morning, so I motivated myself to get out of the door by imagining one of Mokoko's almond croissants. That got me on my way, and I wandered across to Bedminster, through Greville Smyth Park, along most of the length of North Street (looking out for new Upfest 75-pieces-in-75-days artwork as I went) and then onto some new roads at the far end.
I only wanted to knock a few streets off my "to do" list, but by the time I'd diverted here and there to check out various bits of graffiti and other attractions and come back via the aforementioned purveyors of Bristol's finest croissants, I'd walked 7.4km. Not bad for someone who woke up tired, and at least I've done something with my day. I'm very glad the weather broke (we had tremendous thunderstorms yesterday), even if some of the pictures might've looked better with a blue sky. I was getting fed up with walking around in 29°C heat...
A Film Is Not Dead production, apparently. If I'd known I'd have brought one of my film cameras. This would probably look pretty good on the extremes of either Ektar or Lomo Metropolis.
It looked interesting, but then I realised I'd actually walked through it at night, some time back...
At the end of July I went to have a look around some of the private gardens opened up by the annual Green Squares and Secret Gardens event. Sadly it was compressed into a single day this year, for various Covid-related reasons, it seems, so I didn't get to poke around too many places. I went to:
- A talk by the oldest resident of Victoria Square
- The St Vincent's Rocks Hotel garden
- The Paragon garden
- Cornwallis Crescent gardens, both east and west
- The Polygon garden
And snapped a few things in between, too. It was a lovely day—a bit too hot, if anything—and it was interesting to get into a few places I'd only ever seen from the outside, especially The Paragon and Cornwallis gardens, which are the least visible to passing strangers of all of them.
I've been wanting to go through these gates for a while; you can only get tantalising glimpses of the listed extension from the bit of grass adjacent.
This was a wide-ranging wander. I started off crossing the river to Bedminster, to walk a single little cul-de-sac, Hardy Avenue, that I'd managed to miss on at least one previous walk. Then, pausing only to explore a few back alleyways, I headed for a few destinations related mostly by the Hughes family, who I've been researching a little as part of background for a possible novel, as several of them were involved in the Stella Matutina.
However, mostly it's the artistic side of the family I wanted to explore today, as that's where most of their public history lies (as you might expect, there's often not much in the public record about the workings of an occult organisation.) First I visited College Green, where the façade of the Catch 22 Fish & Chip shop still bears the work of Catherine Edith Hughes. Then I wandered up to the top of Park Street to pop into the Clifton Arts Club's annual exhibition, as Catherine, her half-brother Donald, his wife Hope and at least two other Hugheses were members. Donald was chairman for 40 solid years; Hope was Secretary for eight, and Ellard and Margaret Hughes, two more Hughes siblings, were members along with Catherine.
Finally I walked home with a small diversion to Berkeley Square, to confirm the location of Donald Hughes's house by checking for a particular plaque by the front door.
I must admit I'm not entirely sure where all this research is really leading me, but I'm finding it quite interesting to bump across the faint lines of history that link the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, to modern, quotidian Bristol.
My guess is that these rental parking spaces are very popular when there's a match on at Ashton Gate. I could hear the cheering coming from the stadium from my front room in Hotwells over this weekend (I'm writing this on October 3, 2021, as I've got a bit of a photo-processing backlog!) so it seems that biggish matches—either football or Rugby or both—are back on.
A little remnant of the Avon's history, I assume, gently rusting away on the bank by Cumberland Road
Must've taken some time to put together. And done with some skill, to still look so good nearly 120 years later.
There really was a lot. I didn't like to snap inside, but I thought one shot would give a flavour. There was a lot of good stuff. I shall be going back next year.
Lisa and I mostly went out to have a look at Luke Jerram's Museum of the Moon as its tour hit Bristol Cathedral—I missed it when it was previously in town, at Wills Hall, I think—but we also took a trek up to Redland. Lisa's kind enough to indulge my strange current fascination with the Edwardian eccentrics that made up the Stella Matutina, so we swung by a couple of places with a vague connection to the Bristol branch of the organisation. Well, it was good walking, anyway...
As a stunning bonus, one of the picture's descriptions has more information than you'd probably want on the Bristol Port Railway and Pier's Clifton Extension Railway line, but I did happen to coincidentally write up this wander after reading about the extension line during my lunch hour at work today. It's a thrilling life, I tell you...
"They afterwards built, in connexion with their convent, an asylum for the reception of about one hundred sick and aged poor, means for the maintenance of whom they obtained by soliciting alms from door to door"
More from ChurchDB:
"The order was founded by St Jeanne Jugan, after she rescued two poverty-stricken elderly women from the streets of Paris during the French Revolution. The Sisters' work continues today, in providing care for the elderly - for an account of this, see the article Celebrating the Little Sisters with big hearts published in the Bristol Post on 15th October 2012, reporting on the celebration of 150 years of their work."
And even more on Wikipedia, of course...
I had no idea who had done this when I snapped it, but on a later wander I found this bit of street art only a few hundred yards from my front door which seems to confirm the artist as @maybepaints.
There's actually a Hotwells connection here, fairly literally. This section of track, from Ashley Hill, Montpellier, Redland, this bit right here, then Clifton Down and through a tunnel under the Downs to Sneyd Park Junction and Sea Mills station, was built as the Bristol Port Railway extension line, the Clifton Extension Railway.
The original Bristol Port Railway and Pier connected Hotwells to a deep-water pier at Avonmouth (with a few stations along the way) avoiding the need to have ships wait for the right tide to come into Bristol to unload. We've previously been inside one of its tunnels.
It was also used by plenty of passengers—during WWI an extra platform was added in Hotwells to cope with the sheer number of Bristolians commuting to the docks and munitions factories daily as part of the war effort, as well as troop movements and incoming wounded on hospital trains.
Later on this isolated Bristol Port track needed to join up to the existing railway network to survive, so this extension line was added to connect it with Ashley Hill with help from the Great Western and Midland railways. Only later did the section to Hotwells fall into disuse and close in favour of the Portway road.
(Information mostly courtesy Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier, Oakwood Press, 1975.)
