On the Joys of Urban Rambling

In a bit of a departure for me, this post isn't really about beer - or, at least only tangentally.

About 75% of the time we live right on the edge of a large town with proper countryside (aka The South Downs National Park) within a 20 minute grunt up a hill from our front door.

The beauty of the SDNP is obvious and indisputable.

In a medium-sized city such as Bristol, you have to get your walking interest in slightly different ways.

We walk a lot in Bristol (only mad people would willingly drive) and we also get buses and trains when we need to go further.

We actively seek different ways of arriving at familiar places and seeing what the streetscape has to offer.  We now have a collective general interest in architecture and how stuff works and so you'll frequently find us, whilst on a walkabout, stopping and pointing at stuff whilst doing a lot of wondering how that thing comes to be where, or why it's designed like that.

Thus the day we decided to revisit The Orchard a few days ago, I suggested to the man that we could go onto North Street since we weren't very far away.  Being a new(ish)comer to the city, the boy doesn't always know which bits of the city join to other bits.  He's *way* better than me at orienting himself with regard to the compass (or a river or whatever) but, like me, his internal map sections aren't always contiguous.

It was with great joy, therefore, that I suggested a route across a bridge he hadn't walked across before.  It wasn't far from bits of the harbourside/Southville areas that he knew quite well but 15 minute walk had both of us buzzing with "street we've never walked down" excitement.  The area isn't significantly different in character to the rest of the place but it still prompted us to look around at the area.  All the while the boy was working out where he might be in relation to places he knows and then there's the payoff of arriving at the familiar.  We've done this many, many times in Bristol.

Obviously, it's getting slightly harder as we both learn more about this city.

Nevertheless, he was craving a proper walk yesterday (you know, one with mud and trees) but didn't really want to rely on buses.  So I found small wooded area in Brislington - which is an area I really know very well at all.  Map and community group research done I described the general direction we were heading and how it related to other walks we've done.

We headed out along the Feeder via a slightly different route (via Moor Brewery and a railway bridge) and where the Feeder joins the River we headed into entirely new territory:  St Anne's.

We had one false start when we saw a tree on a hill but, putting that behind us, we struck onto a pretty unpromising road system and then (as promised) found ourselves in the woods, next to a brook.  Birdsong outweighed traffic in terms of volume and we schlurped along some muddy paths for about two miles or so.  There's one slight hiatus as the woods are dissected by a road which means steep stairs back out of the wood, crossing a road, and finding another entrance to the next bit...but once in the next valley it was a real revelation.  The day was heavy with fog which made the winter landscape all the more atmospheric.  When we got to the end of the valley we headed towards more familiar territory and stopped for a break in Bocabar in Paintworks.  The beer was good but the place has lost all but one of its cask pumps (which has Doom Bar) so it was a couple of pints of local (lovely)keg IPA to regroup.  Also to mourn the place as a true beer destination for us.

I suggested that we head back to the Barley Mow by a slightly different route to that we'd normally take since we'd had a recent discussion about a turning from the A4 into the St Phillips Marsh area that he had never really noticed - so we walked that way.

The route is relatively uninteresting from a features point of view - and somewhat stinky since we had to pass the refuse facility.  But we loved it!  That's the point really - it was a different route and there's an exploratory sense of achievement.  As we got closer to our part of St Phillips and he worked out where we were he was keen to try other streets we don't usually walk down.

We often discuss whether friends and family would enjoy our urban perambulations as much as we do - since they often take the gritty routes through areas of poverty and untidiness.  I'm not entirely sure most of our pals would entirely get it which makes me feel blessed that my best buddy has such an appreciation of the unlikley and unloved bits of this city.  Yes, we're motivated by beer as well as exploration but it's not a bad hobby as things go, eh?