Symbolic Forest

When the weather forecast says there’s going to be snow I’m always slightly cynical. For one thing, I’m suspicious the forecast always errs on the side of caution when it comes to snow. Secondly, in this part of town, snow falls less and sticks less than on the higher ground of high-altitude suburbs like Clifton and Horfield. In Easton, the snow is rare and quickly turns to slush.

I was slightly surprised, then, when there was about an inch of lying snow when we got up this morning. Given it was fairly surely going to be half-melted by lunchtime, the only thing to do was to head outside straight away.

We headed to a spot that will be very familiar to regular readers: Greenbank Cemetery. Although we were an hour or so before the official opening time, the cemetery was already busy with people who had sneaked through the many, many gaps in the fence. The slopes near the gates were bigger with sledgers, so we headed to the quieter parts where the snows were deeper.

I was quite taken by this piece of Victorian doggerel that I’ve never noticed in the cemetery before.

In loving memory of William Randall, who died April 14^th 1891, aged 56 years.

Afflictions sore with patience bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God saw fit to take me home,
And ease me of my pain.

Also Martha Randall, wife of the above, who died September 25th 1894, aged 58 years.

There wasn’t space for an equally awful poem for Martha as well; or for their children, commemorated around the other side.

Beside the cemetery, the nature reserve under the disused Midland Railway viaduct was a bit of a muddy slough. All around us the snow was melting, dripping constantly from the trees.

We returned home via the area’s other prime sledging spot, Rosemary Green, a part of town that I’ve been intending to write about here for a while, although in recent years its history has been thoroughly documented by the Bristol Radical History Group, culminating in the book 100 Fishponds Road: Life and Death in a Victorian Workhouse by Ball, Parkin and Mills. To cut a long story short (if you want the full story go and buy the book): to avoid increasing the council tax poor rate, the board of Eastville Workhouse thought they would save money on funerals by buying a piece of waste ground behind the workhouse, paying the Church of England’s somewhat exorbitant consecration fee, and packing dead residents into mass graves without having to pay for coffins, priests, artisanal gravediggers and the like. Through the second half of the 19th century, probably around 4,000 poor people were buried unmarked in the mass grave. About fifty years ago the workhouse was knocked down to build a housing estate. As the Church disclaimed all responsibility, the bodies were dug up by bulldozer, and the larger bones were pulled out and reburied in a second unmarked mass grave in Avonview Cemetery. The soil and the smaller bones were spread out across the site. Today, Rosemary Green is a pretty and quiet little piece of green space, grass sloping steeply down from the housing estate to a small football pitch at the bottom; but if you were to dig a hole there, you would find the soil is full of small fragments of crushed human bone from thousands of different people.

Today, of course, it was busy with sledging children and snowmen; but it was barely mid-morning and almost all the snow had already been sledged away. By the time we got home, the sound of trickling water in every gutter and drain filled the streets. Mid-afternoon, as I write this, the snow has gone with barely a sign it was here. At least I can share these photos.

Keyword noise: Bristol, winter, seasons, snow, death, cemetery, Greenbank, Eastville, Easton, Greenbank Cemetery, history, local history, railway, disused, Rosemary Green.

The combination of being back at work, and the ongoing pandemic situation (particular disastrous in this misgoverned country) means that photography at the moment is limited to things we can photograph whilst walking-for-exercise (if it was walking-for-fun it would be strictly forbidden, of course). Luckily, there are enough interesting views within walking distance that it doesn’t have to be a completely fallow period. Last weekend, when it was cold, I took the camera out and have already posted here the photos I took of Ridgeway Park Cemetery. However, as it was such a cold and icy day, there were plenty of others too. Being an inner city area, we naturally have dystopian motorway overpasses…

However, there’s also the wide open spaces of Eastville Park.

The park’s pond had frozen and refrozen a few times over the preceding days, and The Children enjoyed seeing how far sticks would slide across the surface of the ice.

The river, though, was unusually clear. We stood a while by Stapleton Weir and watched the river water foaming over the edge.

All in all, it’s not too bad an area to live in.

Keyword noise: photography, Bristol, Easton, Eastville, Eastville Park, winter, water.

Regular readers might remember the post last week about Ridgeway Park Cemetery, a small and heavily overgrown cemetery bordering Eastville Park in Bristol. As our daily exercise at the weekend, I took The Children back there again, but took the Proper Camera with me this time.

It was an excellent winter’s day for taking the camera out, and you can certainly see the difference when compared to the previous photos.

We took the opportunity, as it is winter, to poke around in some of the parts of the cemetery that are completely overgrown and virtually impassable in summer.

I won’t post the full set of photos here because there’s quite a few, but you can go and look at them on Flickr if you’d like; I’ve tried to transcribe some of the inscriptions too.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

Another day, another cemetery, although back on to a human one this time. Back in October, Twitter user @libbymiller asked if I knew Ridgeway Park Cemetery. Although I do know it, and I’ve been foraging for brambles there frequently in summer, for some reason I’ve never taken any photos. Today I woke up, saw it was a fine frosty day, so tried wandering off in that direction.

Ridgeway Park is only small, but its history tracks in microcosm the history of the great urban Victorian cemeteries of Britain. It opened in the 1880s as a private alternative to the nearby city-owned Greenbank Cemetery, filled up with graves, and as it filled up and plot purchases dropped off its owners could no longer make a profit from it. In 1949 the owning company was wound up and the cemetery taken over by the city council.

It was built behind a grand old house, Ridgeway House, which in the 1860s seems to have been the home of the private school attended by local celebrity W G Grace. The house was demolished in the late 30s, and there is now no sign of it at all above the ground as far as I’m aware, although Huyton Road runs on the line of its approach drive. Although the house has disappeared completely, the boundaries of the cemetery still follow the lines of previous boundaries. The following map is from immediately before both the cemetery and Eastville Park were laid out, but the cemetery boundaries can be clearly traced on the tithe map from 40 years earlier.

Unlike the still-active Greenbank, and the much-loved Arnos Vale, Ridgeway Park seems relatively forgotten as cemeteries go. The area near the gates is in reasonable condition, just with grass a little long; but as you go in further, towards the park, it becomes more and more overgrown until you are effectively in a patch of woodland with added gravestones.

If you’re local, this is the ideal time of year to visit somewhere quite so overgrown. If you’re not, you might have to wait a while and come back next winter. Or, indeed, in summer, when it has an entirely different atmosphere but is still just as lovely a spot.

Update, January 11th 2021: I went back to Ridgeway Park with an SLR camera and took some more photos. The new post about it is here.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

Last night was a wild night. Howling wind, hammering rain, the sort of storm that wakes you up as it’s trying to blow your bins down the street.

I was surprised, then, this morning, to find the storm had passed and it was a bright, sunny, fresh winter’s day. Not wanting to waste it, and wanting to get some post-Yuletide fresh air, we headed out to Ashton Court. If you know Bristol, you probably know Ashton Court. If you don’t: it’s an ancient manor, already a manor before the Norman invasion, which was bought by the City Council in the 1950s to avoid it becoming completely derelict.

This is, according to the internet, a much-hacked-about 16th century gatehouse. The interior of Ashton Court is a bit of a mystery, as not much of it is ever open to the public, but its enormous grounds are effectively a public park, albeit a public park that still hosts a herd of red deer. It also hosts a slightly less medieval golf course (boo) and miniature railway (hurrah).

Naturally, today, the railway wasn’t running and I’ve never seen what’s attractive about golf, so we wandered the various gardens and parkland and woods on the estate, nearly slipped over in the soggy, slippy mud from last night’s storm, managed not to fall into the waterlogged haha, and stood by the deer park fence watching the deer.

At the edge of the garden, though, we found something a little more unusual and a little more interesting: the pet cemetery of the last family to live in the house, in the first half of the 20th century. It does not, a hundredish years later, look particularly well cared for.

Presumably most of the graves are of dogs, although the headstones generally stick to euphemisms like “faithful companion” and similar. You have to assume this is the grave of a dog, not a servant.

Some of them are in better condition than others.

If I’d known it was there, I’d have brought the Proper Camera, a sketchbook and a measuring tape. If we have another nice day, maybe I should come back again.

Keyword noise: Bristol, history, local history, death, cemetery, pet cemetery, Ashton Court.

What to do on a Saturday just before Yule? We went for a wander around the Blaise Castle estate, its forests and woods and caves. The museum in the estate’s mansion is not just closed for the winter, but all the windows are securely boarded up; but plenty of people were still climbing up to the folly at the summit of the estate, as ever looking more like a castle than any real castle ever does.

I spotted wild mistletoe in the branches of a tree as we walked under it; I can’t recall ever noticing it in the wild before. We stood back, and realised there were great bushes of it high up in the branches of most of the bare trees in the wood.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Blaise Castle, castles, mistletoe, follies.

As it is such a lovely, sunny, bright and winter day, we went out for a walk, for a picnic on Troopers Hill. The lumpy, bumpy and steep slope overlooking the Avon, crowned with a rough and slightly wonky chimney. It was busyish, not crowded, but full of groups of families, walking dogs, eating picnics and flying kites. We sat and ate our food, tried to look at the view without squinting, and watched buzzards hovering and circling over the woods.

The chimney was probably built in the late 18th century for copper smelting. Various copper and brass works lined the Avon and Frome in the 18th century; it was Bristol’s major industry, powering the city’s corner of the transatlantic slave trade. The chimney on Troopers Hill fumed to turn copper and zinc ore into brass kettles and other ware, for sale in West Africa in exchange for people, to be shipped as slaves to the Caribbean for the enrichment of Bristolian merchants. Quite a dark history for a local landmark. The brass works did not survive the end of the slave trade, as they no longer had a guaranteed profitable market for most of their products; by the mid-19th century, the copper smelters had closed. Troopers Hill was still covered by other heavy industries, though: coal mining, clay mining, stone quarrying, and a tar distillery. As the industries declined through the twentieth century, though, it slowly turned into a slightly wild and unruly green space. The chimney, though, was left looking over everything.

The council have repaired the base of the chimney, where the flues would originally have entered it, and built a little passageway into it. Inside, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Troopers Hill, history, local history, archaeology, industrial archaeology, photography.

A damp, misty, gloomy November weekend: so obviously, we livened it up by taking another walk around Greenbank Cemetery!

Regular readers might recall the post a while back tracking the evolution of the cemetery through maps. When it first opened, an open stream ran to the north of it; over time, this small beck was culverted as the land either side became first allotments then cemetery. This stream is the Coombe Brook; on the 1880s map, it seems to have risen in Speedwell near the Belgium Pit colliery and ran westwards, joining the River Frome just behind the Black Swan, the infamous Easton pub/club originally built in the 17th century. The modern confluence is, presumably, somewhere in a tunnel system deep under the M32 motorway.

Not much of the Coombe Brook is still above-ground at all nowadays. However, if you explore Royate Hill nature reserve, just alongside the cemetery, you can find the point at which it disappears underground.

Water disappearing into this tunnel, assuming it doesn’t get syphoned off into a storm sewer, will come out into daylight again in the River Frome alongside Riverside Park. Unfortunately you can’t see the mouth of the 19th century culvert under the cemetery because it is protected behind the romantically-named Royate Hill Trash Screen.

As it was a bit muddy down here today, we headed back into the cemetery. I took a few more photos of 1930s graves in the part of the cemetery that was formerly allotments: more evidence for my previous post about the cemetery being expanded a few years before the maps says. Moreover, they’re fairly interesting gravestones too.

Keyword noise: history, local history, Bristol, Easton, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, Coombe Brook, cemetery, heritage, culvert, grave.

Overheard on Stapleton Road, around lunchtime: a fragment of a conversation as I passed:

“I got banned from the Esso garage ‘cos I was drinking too much, but I can still buy food.”

Across the road, a man stumbled and slowly, gracefully, went head-over-heels and landed flat on the pavement, carefully protecting a lit cigarette as he fell. He didn’t try to get up, but laid on the pavement, smoking his fag, looking for all the world as if he was as relaxed as he could be.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, overheard.

Semi-regular readers might remember that, about a month ago, I posted about Greenbank Cemetery and its history, and looked at the available historic maps online to track its growth through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This weekend I went back to Greenbank for the first time since I wrote that post, partly for the autumnal atmosphere and partly to see how much evidence is visible on the ground for the different phases of growth I identified on the maps.

The cemetery today is bounded by roads to the north and south, Greenbank Road and Greenbank View. One thing I discovered when writing the previous post is that, according to the maps, there was a phase when there were bands of allotments between the roads and the cemetery itself. The allotments seem to have been created in the Edwardian period; later, the cemetery was extended and swallowed them up. When I visited the cemetery this weekend I went to look for evidence of the northern allotment. The boundary between the cemetery and the allotments (not to mention the field that preceded them) is still clearly evident on the ground.

The area on the left has been part of the cemetery since, I think, its first expansion in 1880. The area on the right, where graves are packed in much more closely together, was a field at that point, then became allotments, then cemetery. If you poke around, there’s some signs that the edge of the cemetery might have been a haha-style sunken wall.

These four trees would have been on the boundary originally. I wonder if they were planted because there was a gate here from the allotments? There’s nothing marked on the map, though, and the map is quite thorough at including the cemetery’s paths, so they may not have been planted until the cemetery was extended.

I said previously that the extension of the cemetery over the allotments “must have happened some time after 1938, as a 6-inch-scale map revised that year still shows the allotments”. That map’s available on the National Library of Scotland website; here’s an extract from it.

However, on walking round the area of allotments shown on this map, I quickly found that an awful lot of graves are of people who died before 1938. The dates on the headstones run back over ten years before that, to the mid-1920s.

The 1920s-dated monuments run all the way up to the road, so it wasn’t a case of the cemetery taking over the allotment step by step either. Although it’s not unheard of for people to be reburied, or for people to be commemorated on headstones in spots they’re not buried in, there are so many 1920s monuments in this part of the cemetery that you can’t really use that explanation for all of them. So, unless I do at some point find some evidence that there genuinely was some sort of mass reburial and movement of graves in Greenbank Cemetery in the late 1930s, something like a Bristolian version of the building of the Paris catacombs, we have to conclude that this is a mistake on the map; or, more likely, that the map isn’t a full revision and the change in size of the cemetery was one of those changes in the real world that the Ordnance Survey didn’t bother to draw onto their maps at that point in time.

If I had copious amounts of free time, it would be very tempting to create a full catalogue of all of the monuments in Greenbank and their dates, and then develop a typology of changes in funerary design, spotting trends between different undertakers and stonemasons. It would be even more interesting still to then do the same for another large Victorian cemetery in a different part of the country, and track the regional differences. Sadly, I have nowhere near enough free time to embark on such a project. I’ll just have to wander around the cemetery, spot things like this occasionally, and enjoy the views.

Maps in this post were reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Keyword noise: history, local history, Bristol, Easton, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, cemetery, heritage, death, weekend, maps, archaeology.