We walked from Pill Creek in North Somerset along the Avon Trail to Bristol. It’s a pleasant route, past Ham Green Fishing Lake and through Leigh Woods to the Cumberland Basin. Halfway along we stopped and ate our sandwiches close to the railway, enjoying a spectacular view of Clifton Suspension Bridge from below.
I’m researching a sequel to A Pair of Sharp Eyes, The Darkest Voyage, which begins with my heroine, Coronation, setting off from Bristol for the West Indies in the summer of 1704. First, she takes a longboat down the river to the Bristol Channel, where her ship is waiting for the trade winds to set sail.
On our walk on Monday we saw herons and lapwings, fritillaries and a Common Blue butterfly. The information boards along the Trail were detailed and absorbing. It wasn’t too difficult to picture the river and the Avon Gorge in pre-industrial times, before the suspension bridge was built and the railway tunnel was cut through the rock below Leigh Woods, and when the air didn’t thrum with the sound of traffic rushing along the Portway towards Avonmouth.
In 1704 the port of Bristol had not yet been overtaken by Liverpool. The river would have been busier than it is today. The water itself crowded with boats; the banks lined with boat-repairers, fishermen, sailmakers, ferrymen, barge-dwellers and mudlarks. The woods would definitely have been less dense; they must have been coppiced, and charcoal-burners and wood-turners would have lived there, as well as game-keepers and small-holders. The peregrine falcons currently nesting in the cliffs would surely have been persecuted in the eighteenth century, though a few individuals may have clung on, before the Victorians hunted them to near-extinction.
Close your eyes and conjure the cries of pilots and shanties sung by on river-going boats, oarsmen groaning with effort as they row against the wind, ship’s bells tolling and gulls shrieking round the masts of boats sailing out to fishing grounds on the coast. The clanking and creaking of wooden cranes lifting cargo onto small ships might have carried on the wind down from the city’s quays. On a summer’s day children surely splashed and played on the muddy shores below Clifton and Hotwells. Horses would have stamped and whinnied at Bower Ashton, waiting for people to climb off the ferry and ride up Rownham Hill. Now, the river strictly demarcates the city from Abbots Leigh and Leigh Woods. Then, the west bank of the Avon may have been as populous as the east.
The river current is strong, and a boat rowed vigorously would not take long to reach the Bristol Channel. We walked through Hotwells to catch the 4X bus back to Pill, leaving Corrie in her longboat, desperate to escape the city but fearful of the perils waiting for her at sea. Sitting on the bus I reflected that I wasn’t much older than Corrie when I left the UK to teach and study in San Francisco in 1991. I took two enormous suitcases, and $6000 in savings, and arranged for 200 books to be shipped out ahead of me, to be used in my research. Most crucially, I had a J-1 visa, which gave me permission to stay and work in the US.
Corrie has no passport. She carries with her a bundle of linen, the clothes she stands up in, a small wooden box and enough money to support her for a few weeks at most. People who travel like that today are brave – and desperate.
The Avon Trail, near Ham Green, North Somerset