The water was looking beautiful
This is where we were
Tag: river Avon
Watching the tide come in
Mini-film, watching the tide slowly come in, last Friday.
And a couple of photos earlier in the same walk – scum on the surface of the Avon, by the Entrance Lock:
Something meaningful, but I don’t know what it means:
Dreich Holga photos
It’s a dreich, dull April – I laughed, because double-checking the spelling of dreich, the Oxford Dictionary example of how to use it is ‘a cold, dreich early April day’. I still haven’t replaced my broken film cameras, but on Saturday, I took one of Vik’s Holgas – a plastic-lensed, medium-format, very basic camera, with 160iso film, because we didn’t have any 400. And I’m really enjoying the results. First, some shots from Ashton Avenue Bridge, with the outflow from Colliter’s Brook into the Avon, and across the river, Ashton Brook (a historic County boundary).
Where are the rivers and streams in Bristol?
Yesterday I wanted to find out more about the Cranbrook, a little stream that’s only above ground for a couple of hundred metres in Redland, before I blogged about exploring it. I couldn’t find out much about it, though in a comment on flickr, iyers told me it once flooded the Arches area of Gloucester Road.
But in failing to find the information I wanted, I found something better: The Big Blue Map of Bristol from Bristol City Council, with the waters marked above and below ground as rivers (though I assume they aren’t showing the ones, like the Cranbrook, might join the sewer system. I love this map, it’s so useful! You know I’m going to be pouring over this, with my OS maps next to me, and planning more walks…
A few photos of the Avon at Lacock
Back in March, I went to Lacock, in Wiltshire, to record a podcast with artist, film-maker, curator and educator Shawn Sobers. It wasn’t the cleverest day to go, as it was snowing on and off, with weather warnings, so it was cold and muddy, but I really enjoyed the day.
We went to Lacock because Lacock Abbey was the home of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography, and I know Shawn from when he was my professor on my Photography degree at the University of the West of England. I’m embarrassed how long it took me to realise that Fox Talbot’s work was taking place on the banks of the Avon, but it felt like the right place to walk and talk about the various strands of Shawn’s work.
You can listen to that podcast here, and I have a couple of photos below. It was a bad day for taking pictures (too cold, for one!), but also, I’ve been finding it hard to take good photos while I’m podcasting, and I need to work out why that is – maybe because podcasting is all about focusing on the conversation, while photography is about being open to the world? But for what it’s worth, a few of my Lacock Avon shots:
Avon Stories Podcast #21: Photography, film, heritage and more, with Dr Shawn Sobers
I met Shawn Sobers when I was doing my Photography degree at the University of the West of England, and he was one of my professors. But that’s just one of the many strings to his bow – Shawn is a filmmaker, photographer, writer and curator, and I always found his community-based practice and his range of interests to be completely inspiring.
We went for a walk along the Avon in Lacock, exploring the landscape where Henry Fox Talbot lived and created processes that gave us modern photography. While we walked, we talked about teaching photography, Shawn’s film practice, his work with National Trust sites helping communities research their links to Transatlantic slavery, and his own role in running a heritage site, curating the Tafari Gallery at Fairfield House, where Emperor Haile Selassie lived in exile in Bath.
Please do forgive the patches of audio problems in the recording. We were walking in the March snow, on a day full of weather warnings, and it proved a bit too much for my audio equipment!
Find out more about Shawn on his website, which has a selection of films we talked about, including his 1999 film on Haile Selassie, Footsteps of the Emperor, his recent art film about the sinking of the SS Mendi, a ship carrying Black South African Labour Corps troops to serve in World War I, and Under The Bridge, the 1990s film for HTV exploring Transatlantic slavery in Bristol, including the River Avon:
Footprints on the Avon mud, and other Thursday photos
On Thursday Vik and I met in town and walked round the Harbour for the Suffragette talk at the Bristol Archives. We were early, so went to the very edge of the Harbour to look at the river, one of our regular walks.
The first thing we enjoyed was this tiny glimpse of one of the silt islands, looking like a whale coming up for air, or a sea monster lurking on the bottom of the river. And an aside – if you look on the maps on Know Your Place, you can see there have been silt islands here since the 1880s, including this one, which I find fascinating.
Of course we went to look at the mud that banks up in what used to be the Brunel lock, one of my very favourite places. There are almost always bird footprints here, but I’ve never seen as many as then. I don’t know if it was a flock on in the middle of migration, or something special had been left on the mud after the spring tide, or it was just that the conditions were extra good for retaining footprints, but it was delightful.
Continue reading “Footprints on the Avon mud, and other Thursday photos”
Snowy walk along the closed Avon path
Last Saturday the snow was still around, and I went walking in it with my friends Kate and Tim. They’d never been down the closed part of the Avon footpath, or seen the Netham Weir, which is there to try to stop the Avon being tidal, so off we went.
Map of our walk:
And photos too. If you mouse over/click on the first photo it should open the slideshow, or you can go directly to the flickr album.
Avon Stories podcast #20: The Avon Canoe Pilot project
Back in 2007, Bristol-based artists Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting were making really interesting work together, including exploring the cities in different ways. One of these was the Avon Canoe Pilot project, which had many strands: sport, trying to get a Blue Flag for the Harbour, dredging rubbish, clearing a jetty, swimming… all of which sound wholesome, but were done in incredibly subversive ways.
I read about this project on their joint website, and I was fascinated. It made me wonder why I never see people on the Avon, only vehicles; to question my own relationships with the water; and it inspired me to start to push my own boundaries of how I relate to the water. I was really happy they agreed to come on the podcast and talk more about why they were doing, how and why.
To find more about the various projects we discussed and more work relating to the water, follow the links:
- The Avon Canoe Pilot portal, and the PDF of the booklet they made about it
- The Bristol Blue Flag project and
- Dredging in the Harbour
- The Canoe ferry jetty
- The Disco Canoe
- Heath’s Avon Wild Swimming event
There are lots more projects that Heath and Kayle worked on as the DUO Collective, on their website.
There’s more information about Kayle, including a list of works, bio and CV here.
Heath’s information is here, and you can also check out his wikipedia page and the Tate page about his A Terrorist – a status project and Tate video interview about that, and his BorderXing project.
All images are from the Avon Canoe Pilot Project booklet, and are used with kind permission of Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting.
Snow day Avon
Because we’re on the water, and in the south, it doesn’t often snow in Bristol, and if it does, it rarely sticks, so the huge “Beast from the East” snowmaggedon was a huge deal here, that I’m sure people in Scotland and the Frozen North are rolling their eyes at. But not having to get anywhere, with a warm house and a stocked pantry, it was a ton of fun, just for a weekend.
On Friday Vik and I walked along the Avon and up to Stokeleigh Camp, the Iron Age fort in Leigh Woods, and back. While the parks and slopes were full of children sledging, once we got to the Avon footpath, it was really empty, with much less traffic on the Portway than usual. All the interesting layers pulled into focus, outlined by snow, from the terraces of Hotwells, to the striations of the Gorge.
Up in the woods it was pretty magical, with everything so quiet we could hear the falling snow hit the evergreen and remaining dead autumn leaves. We walked around the Fort walls and talked about what it might have been like to live there, as the wind blew swirls of snowflakes off the drifts on top of the earthworks. As we walked home, a skier passing us on the Nightingale Valley path, the tracks we and others had made were already covered in snow, and it felt like we were the first people to walk on the path, and on the silt banks. It was a gorgeous day.
Photos are in the album – mouse over/click the first image to get the slideshow, or go straight to flickr.
Avon Stories 