Tagged: wood
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...
An unexpected child's doll is always a bit creepy. I suppose that's why the Child's Play franchise did so well.
Anyway, we'll leave things on this most random of photos of the railings of the Mall pub's garden. I'm off to grab a sandwich and head back to work...
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...
There's a couple on the balcony taking a selfie in this direction. I wonder if I've been immortalised as a few pixels in the background of their photo...
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.
This is the road I didn't have many (or any) snaps of that inspired my route today, not that I need much of an excuse to traipse around Cliftonwood on a sunny lunchtime.
As promised, a bit more detail of the Amhurst door from the listing:
Left-of-centre doorway has Gibbs surround and thin consoles to a pediment, architrave with a split key, overlight with 4 pointed-arched panes and a 6-panel door, the upper ones raised.
Hopefully someone plans to give it a lick of paint at some point soon...
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 bridge seemed to be taking a while to lock back into place, and I don't recall seeing one of the life-jacketed operators wandering up and down it before. I did wonder if something had gone wrong, but it closed eventually.
And there's often also a cormorant and some other birds hanging out on the end of this pontoon at the slipway near the Nova Scotia, too.
Or possibly the way in. Can't've been much fun, being escorted through these gates and knowing you were going to stay here for some time. I doubt prisons have ever been a barrel of laughs, but Victorian prisons definitely have a fairly terrifying reputation.
Presumably this was the entrance to the stairs down to the ferry, long ago bricked up. There certainly seems to be a stairway behind it, though it's hard to tell for sure...
Well, it slopes down to the riverside at the top of the slipway. I presume there are still steps under there.
I'm sure I must have seen/noticed this giant pile on the corner of the New Cut and Bedminster Parade before, but It's quite well-hidden from the road.
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".
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...
The towpath is a lovely stroll in weather like this. Waterproof walking shoes help, though, as the puddles are often wide enough to span the entire width. I baptised my new walking shoes on this trip.
There are several ways into Leigh Woods along the towpath, all underneath bridges of the Portishead branch line that runs above.
At the one before this, which is normally locked and leads into a disused police shooting range, a woman beckoned me over to where she was standing with her bike, looking through the gates. "I think I've found your best shot today," she said Sadly, the very wide lens on the camera would have made any picture of the young deer that was standing in the sunlit distance a bit rubbish, so I contented myself with a few moments just looking at the scene.
One of the things you learn as you improve as a photographer is when not to bother trying to take a photo because you can't do it justice, and to just be in the moment and enjoy it instead.
There's been a lot of logging in Leigh Woods recently. Some of it is to control Ash Dieback, some of it to make way for the reintroduction of native trees.
I was heading for my usual mid-walk picnic bench but I guess they're logging in that area right now, so I had to divert.
Approaching what amounts to the "main road" through Leigh Woods, that runs along the crest of the slope down to the towpath.
Presumably, at some point in the past, the electric lines rising out of the ground here were actually connected to somewhere else from this post.
There's been some footage doing the rounds on Twitter recently that's apparently of a Ukrainian farmer towing some Russian military equipment away, with a panicked Russian soldier in foot pursuit, which sprang to mind as soon as I saw this tractor sitting in the woods.
The going is normally a little firmer here. I guess that tractor's been going back and forth a lot, and the recent near-continuous rain probably hasn't helped.
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.
The windows of the Bedminster terraces are often interesting. Here's a colourful octopus from my wander back to Sarah and Vik's place to do a crossword or three.
(The general setup is that Sarah and I attempt a Guardian cryptic, and Vik is very entertained by Sarah's increasing annoyance at the stretching of the English language, bad puns, obscure words and generally terrifying wordplay.)
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"
Looks like the stones at the bottom corner were replaced with some simple poured concrete with grip lines drawn across it at some point.
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...
Well, I hope he's bringing the sign he nicked from this end of Paxton Drive with him.
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.
Not much to be seen in this direction except the crane on the site where they're busily filling a gap with new flats. We'll see the front in a little while.
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...)
This is the south end of Camden Terrace's little private garden, seeing as I seem to be on a bit of a garden and flower theme at the mo.
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.
...doesn't sound like the kind of man who would appreciate the somewhat lax attitude his gravestone is taking to uprightness.
It didn't seem likely that there was a large scattering of windfall apples in Victoria Square. In April. Under a pine tree. On closer inspection, they had plastic supermarket stickers on them, so I think they're unlikely to have fallen from anywhere local...