Bristol, books, birds and balloons

I had to deliver a great pile of books and cards to Bristol's City Museum and the new M Shed, last week. Fortunately, I'd just bought a new trailer for the bicycle. Each of the two loads was pushing up towards the 35 kilo weight limit for the trailer, and it was quite fun hurtling down Whiteladies Road (and even more so, Park Street ) and hoping to heck the brakes would handle it (they did, just).

Among the books in the trailer was The Bristol Downs - a natural history year, which is now £5, and available at a good museum near you if you happen to be in Brizzle; or from my Etsy shop! Lots of pictures by me, and descriptions by Geraldine, of the birds, beasts, trees, fungus and plants of the area; and I wrote an introduction to the geology and history of the Downs, which you can read here. 

I also delivered a big box of Bristol and Ballooning, also £5, and just in time for this weekend's Balloon Fiesta.  Full of pictures of, er, Bristol and Ballooning. Info here. If you'd like a copy of it but can't get to Bristol, let me know and I'll stick some up on Etsy. Easy peasy.

I like it when the wind blows the balloons this way during the mass ascents. Sometimes they all descend on the Downs at the end of the road, like this

...and sometimes they go ghosting past, and I scramble up onto the roof and watch them go by

butterflies

butterflies, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here's a bit of butterfly brightness.


Brimstone, Comma, Marbled White
Common Blue (M), Common Blue (F), Meadow Brown
Holly Blue (M), Holly Blue (F), Peacock
Speckled Wood, Orange Tip (F), Orange Tip (M)
Red Admiral, Small copper (M), Small Tortoiseshell

...the butterflies feature in The Bristol Downs: A Natural History Year. I thought it wold be nice to make a collage of them, so I have. Is this a collage? Oh, you know.

the Canberra that went under the bridge

Canberra and suspension bridge, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Continuing my series of true, gen-yoo-wine and authentic pictures of Aeroplanes That Flew Under The Clifton Suspension Bridge, here is a Canberra B2 jet bomber of 101 Squadron RAF, doing just that, on a summer's morning in 1951.

Come to think of it, in default of any further information on that flight, I reckon it's probably the 60th anniversary.

Shocking to think that it was so long ago... when I was very young, in Lancashire, I used to watch English Electric Lightnings flying around above where we lived, out on the flatlands of Longton Moss. They glinted silvery in the sun. They were test flying, from Samlesbury.

English Electric also built the Canberra. When we drove into Preston, we used to pass a long factory building that said English Electric on the wall, and I got excited at the thought of the jet aeroplanes they were building inside. It was not for some years that I discovered the company also built fridges....

..funny business, the companies that got involved with aircraft building. Like Boulton-Paul, who built the rather disastrous Defiant, and who are (or were) better known for building garden sheds....

some tags: flight, flying, flew, under, beneath, Bristol, Avon Gorge, aircraft, aeroplanes, RAF

counting the goats

The goats have arrived in the Avon Gorge. So we went to see them.

First, though, we did a little detour to my favourite cave, at Burwalls, just over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Mal was impressed. She knew someone who used to live in a cave, and wondered if this was the one. "He got flooded out. He came round, all muddy."

"Maybe it was one on the other side," I said. "There are some quite shallow caves over there. This one is pretty sheltered."

She phoned him to find out, but only got an answering machine. The wonders of technology. You can phone someone from a cave, but that doesn't mean they'll answer you.

Climbing through the woods again, a fox sauntered past. It gave Mal an indifferent glance as it passed.

When we emerged onto the grass above, the fox was there again. This time, Pig saw the fox. The fox saw pig. It took a moment for their atavism to kick in. Then they were off! -crashing through the undergrowth, immediately out of sight and the noise of the chase rapidly receding.

"Pig! Pig!" we called, preparing to mount a rescue mission. Pig once had to be saved from rocky death by abseiling coastguards, down in Devon, after she took an ill-advised turn down a cliff. And the Avon Gorge is pretty cliffy.

Pig trotted out of the trees, perky as you like.

Pig, in relaxed mood

"Maybe Pig should go on the lead", we agreed, when we came to the goat enclosure in Walcombe Slade.

Scrambling around the edge of the gully, we saw three big white goat-ish things, sunbathing on an outcrop across the way. Very placid they looked.

The goats are feral, and came from Great Orme, near Llandudno. There are six males, and they've been neutered, which apparently renders them less likely to go wandering off.

A while ago, I'd suggested that the goats, being welsh, should be greeted bardically, with poetry and song. The Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife folk thought that this might be a bit upsetting for the goats. So here is a small verse for the occasion. Quietly, now.

Mellifluously bleating, fleet of hoof,
Vertiginous in choice of your abode;

Be you aged billy, white-fleeced yoof,

Welcome to Bristol, anyroad.

And here's a traditional song to help you count goats.

wild places

At last I've got into gear and am painting pictures, and I'm pleased with the way this one is going. It's a fox catching hailstones in its mouth. It was something that Geraldine Taylor spotted on the Zoo Banks, on the Downs. Assuming I don't mess the picture up, it'll be in the Bristol Review of Books and in Geraldine's new work-in-progress book.

There's been a lot of nature around the place lately. I walked along the Severn estuary on Sunday, exploring the bit where the railway tunnel and the new bridge intersect.



This is a shaft that was dug to tunnel outwards from, and is now used to pump water out of the tunnel. The one on the Welsh side is more impressive, because it pumps out the Great Spring, which was discovered in dramatic circumstances during the construction of the tunnel, and which has in its time supplied an ordnance factory, a paper mill, and, now, the brewery that makes Becks and Stella beer.

Anyway, the recent snows have been thoroughly washed away by the rain, and the sun shone brightly, and the birds agreed with me that it felt like spring, and were singing in a chirpy sort of way all over the place. A couple of blue tits were bobbing round in circles, occasionally performing sudden vertical climbs. Similarly, a grey squirrel in next door's garden was performing high-speed circles punctuated by great leaps into the air. Lord knows what that was about; perhaps it was art.

And the magpies in the plane tree at the front of the house have been repairing the nest where they reared their single chick last year, before it was killed by the local fox. Gratifyingly, the car parked below the nest was spattered with twigs and magpie crap. It is this car's owner who cleared the snow before driving away last week, throwing the snow onto the footpath where I had cleared the snow. Karma!

confessions of a pedalling book pedlar

It was about time to get out there and make sure that All Good Bookshops were properly stocked with The Bristol Downs - A Natural History Year. So I got on my bike.

First stop was a Small Independent Bookshop. They'd got in touch with Geraldine last week saying that they urgently needed six more copies of the book, so her husband Keith had dropped some in from their collection. So all I needed to do was drop in an invoice and pick up the cheque for the previous invoice which... hadn't yet been paid...

The proprietor was there chatting with the person on the counter, as I arrived on my bike. But by the time I'd locked the bike and gone in, she was no longer there.

"I'm just dropping off this invoice for the books that you received," I said; "and there is still this outstanding invoice from the previous books..."

"I'll just go and see..." says the nice young man.

I wait.

"She's just about to go out for lunch with her daughter," he said; "It's A Level results day..."

I agree to come back on Monday.

On Monday she is about to go out to lunch with her mother.

I leave my mobile number.

It doesn't get used.

Catherine had said good things about a local card shop which had taken some copies of the book last year. So I went there too. It is in a pretty affluent suburb, where the 4x4s and people-carriers roam free, and it sells expensive trinkets and posh chocolate to the sort of people who like to give expensive trinkets and posh chocolate to other people to mark important waypoints through life. It is the sort of shop I have walked or cycled past for years, without really noticing it or wanting to go in.

I explain my mission to a rather worn-looking woman on the counter. She presses a bell on the wall, and a large woman appears, advancing in a little cloud of huffiness and puffiness.

"Do you have a seller's appointment?" she asks.

I admit that I do not.

I am far too busy to see you today," she says. "You may leave samples if you wish."

She huffs and puffs back through her door.

I decide that I do not wish.

the Bristol Downs: geology and history

I live right next to the Downs in Bristol, and I was going to write something about them in my blog, but thought that, if you didn't know the area, a bit of explanation might be useful. So here is the introduction to the geology and history of the Bristol Downs that I wrote for this book

The Bristol Downs: Geology and History

The Bristol Downs are part of a limestone ridge which extends north-eastwards from Clevedon. It was formed by sedimentation and deposition when a tropical sea spread over the area during the early Carboniferous period, 354 million years ago. Fossils of marine creatures can be seen where the rock is exposed. During the Hercynian period (about 290 million years ago), when the ancient continents of Laurasia and Gondwana collided, this rock was folded and pushed up into mountains. It was then eroded, deposited upon, uplifted and again eroded until the present surface was once more exposed.

The Gorge was created during the Ice Ages which have come and gone over the last two million years. The Bristol area wasn’t glaciated, but an ice sheet advanced from Ireland up into the Bristol Channel, and it is probable that the Avon cut its way through the Downs because it had been impeded in its original westward flow through Ashton Vale and beyond by this advancing ice front. In the interglacial periods, animals such as bears, elephants, horses, rhinos and hyaenas inhabited the area. Remains of these animals were found in a quarry in Durdham Down in 1842; today part of this discovery (hyaena and elephant bones) can be seen at the City Museum, along with some stone tools of our ancestors, showing that they too were present. The Downs would have been covered with mixed woodland, except in the steeper and rockier areas which would have been colonised by grasses and scrub, much as they are today.

Tree felling began as long as 4000 years ago, and there are field systems evident between Ladies Mile and the Zoo Banks. During the Iron Age, the Dobunni tribe built a hill fort on Observatory Hill, which, together with the two forts on the Leigh Woods side of the Gorge, dominated the river. The Romans in turn built villas in the area, and the road which they built, linking Bath with the port of Abonae (Sea Mills), can still be traced near Stoke Road. The Saxons established grazing rights on the Downs and left boundary stones from Walcombe Slade (Black Rock Gully) to the Water Tower. By the time of William the Conqueror, The Domesday Book of 1086 records the Manor of Clifton as having a population of thirty, of whom half were farm labourers. The Downs provided grazing for the commoners of Clifton and Henbury, and land was leased by the Lords of the Manors for quarrying, lead mining, and limekilns.

The Downs witnessed some turbulence over the centuries. The Royalist army grouped here before taking the city in 1643, and then the Parliamentarians did the same thing two years later. For centuries this was not an area to cross after nightfall because of the footpads and highwaymen, who, if caught, were suspended from the gibbet at the top of Pembroke Road - or Gallows Acre Lane as it was known until the 1850s. With the advent of turnpikes, a tollbooth was installed at the top of Bridge Valley Road in 1727, and then attacked by rioting miners. More recently, troops were stationed here during both world wars, and the Second World War saw the erection of stone obstacles to prevent the landing of enemy aircraft, the tethering of barrage balloons, and the positioning of an anti-aircraft battery at the Dumps. With the arrival of American troops, the Downs were used as a vehicle assembly area in readiness for D Day, and wild flowers flourished between tanks in this temporary respite from mowing.

More of a threat to the Downs, though, was encroaching development. Clifton became a fashionable place of resort with the development of Hotwells as a spa in the late 17^th century. John Evelyn described a hunt for Bristol Diamonds (quartz geodes) in 1654:

What was most stupendous to me, was the rock of St Vincent, a little distance from the Towne, the precipice whereof is equal to any thing of that nature I have seene in the most confragose cataracts of the Alpes: The river gliding between them after an extraordinary depth: Here we went searching for Diamonds, & to the hot Well at its foote….

Although development faltered with Hotwell’s decline, by the 19^th century it had again revived with the expanding and affluent middle classes seeking to escape from the noxious industrial heart of the city in the valley of the Frome to the fresher air of the suburbs near the Downs. .Quarrying, mining, clay extraction and illicit enclosure all caused further public concern at the loss of the Downs as an amenity for all the citizens of Bristol. The City bought Durdham Down from the Lords of the Manor of Henbury and, along with the Merchant Venturers who owned the Clifton Downs, obtained an Act of Parliament to ensure free public access.

Plans were enacted for the ‘beautification’ of the Downs. The Circular Road was built, quarry workings were filled in, and avenues of trees planted. Change also came about by the decline in sheep grazing, which had hitherto kept in check the growth in trees and scrub; it died out on Clifton Down in the 19^th century, and effectively ended in 1925 on Durdham Down, although the University of Bristol periodically exercise their commoners’ rights, last grazing their sheep here in 2007. Today, management of the Downs is the responsibility of the Downs Committee and Downs Ranger, and they remain a popular resort for nature watching, kite flying, sports, shows, fairs and the countless other pastimes engaged in by Bristolians.

The Bristol Downs: another book event

So. On Tuesday 2nd December, we're doing a little show at Bristol Zoo, which will include Geraldine giving a talk, and me doing a Powerpoint thing about illustration. And there will be mince pies, apparently. And I shall be taking along my big bottle of Damson vodka, too. What's not to like?

incendiaries and sheep

...definitely the last picture for the Downs Wildlife book; this one accompanies my two-page romp through 350 million years of history, and is based upon Geraldine remembering having heard someone talking about the war years:

...More recently, troops were stationed here during both world wars, and the Second World War saw the erection of stone obstacles to prevent the landing of enemy aircraft, the tethering of barrage balloons, and the positioning of an anti-aircraft battery at the Dumps. With the arrival of American troops, the Downs were used as a vehicle assembly area in readiness for D Day, and wild flowers flourished between tanks in this temporary respite from mowing.

I asked my landlady, who lived in this very house during the war, if she could confirm that tanks were there; she wrote down her recollections of Bristol in the Blitz, and told me that an incendiary had come through my kitchen ceiling. I looked at the kitchen floor and imagined a German incendiary bomb sitting there fizzing but failing to go off. Gosh.