View allAll Photos Tagged widcombe
I've started walking into work again. Forrest has got itchy feet. This is the view I am greeted crossing the fields from Widcombe Hill to Smallcombe.
Smoke drifts across Widcombe from Ex LMS 4-6-0 46100 Royal on the return working of the Cathedrals Express from London to Bristol in the afternoon Somerset sunshine.
Video available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4SkbREEbJI
Prior Park, (c1733-50) is located on the North facing slopes below Combe Down with its garden extending down to Widcombe. Built for Ralph Allen in his own Bath Stone it served both as his country residence (he also had a beautiful town house in Bath) and an advertisement for the quality of the stone quarried from his Combe Down quarries. The original architect was John Wood the Elder, but he was replaced by Richard Jones after a quarrel with Allen. It is essentially a Palladian Villa, in which the central mansion - seen here - is flanked either side by long low galleries linking two flanking pavilions, one containing a magnificent private chapel built in 1844 as the Church of St Paul's. Today the house is a Catholic Public School and the wonderful landscaped grounds which include a fine Palladian Bridge and lake are owned by the National Trust.
See rest of the "Bath - Cold Winter 2010" set here: www.flickr.com/photos/david_lewis_baker_arts/sets/7215762...
My FIAT Millecinquecento Familiare parked on Widcombe Hill in Bath with snow on its windows around 1971/72.
VW Beetle, Austin 1100 and Ford Popular are in Widcombe Crescent.
3 wing mirrors might seem a bit excessive but it was left-hand drive (built in Germany).
Seen from the Dolmeads section of Bath, here is the frequently posted North Parade Bridge, which extended the North Parade, the elegant and exclusive street that faced the Lower Assembly Rooms (demolished) in the Bowling Green and architect John Wood the Elder’s North Parade Houses.
The bridge was constructed between 1835-1836 by engineer W. Tierney Clark, and its original structure was “cast iron with ashlar piers, one enclosing a staircase to the riverside, another formerly a toll collector’s residence. F. R. Sisson, City Engineer, clad the span in ashlar in 1936-7. The bridge continues as a viaduct to the east, with two lodges, 1835-6, in Jacobean style with well-preserved strapwork.” (1)
Built to give connection between city and Widcombe, with an original halfpenny toll charge. It was also “a respectable, safe, and ornamental approach, which is at present attainable by circuitous route over the Old Bridge (at all times ineligible for female pedestrians of respectability), or by endeavoring to avoid Scylla falling on Charybdis and wading through that reproach to the neighborhood, the filthy and odious Dolmeads” (2)
1: Michael Forsyth, Bath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 109.
2: John Ede, Special Walks (Bath: Department of Leisure and Tourist Services, Bath City Council, 1984), 19.
Amazing day today - virtually no cake left at Heni's as we got there late, but our timing was impeccable - we managed to see
a) first bumble bee of the year
b) first butterfly of the year
c) a kingfisher, second of the year, and - WHOO HOOO!!! -
d) a PEREGRINE, setting off from the nesting area in the tower of the Catholic Church of St. John's, whipping around over Pulteney Weir then absolutely terrorizing the Herring Gulls that - get this - had the audacity to try and bully it around. Dumbass gulls. They got the picture *sharpish* when our razor-clawed hero turned and dived and totally let them know they were screwed if they dicked with it. Because we have seen lesser black-backed gulls turned into lunch by peregrines before, Herrings have NO chance. But they were smart enough to back off when Perry got zippy.