Bristol (Avon) – Suspension Bridge & Cabot Tower
December 27, 2016
Our itinerary for today was to visit Bristol (Avon*) and Bath . We headed out soon after 8 – the journey would take about an hour and half to two hours depending on traffic.
Driving along the A303 (motorway to the south) was smooth and barely any traffic. The most impressive part was coming along the road past Stonehenge (we were going to visit this on Wednesday 28 – see next post). You’re just driving along and there it is, this impressive circle of stones on a slight hill of green grass, there is nothing else around it, a wide open space and the stones, against the bright blue winter sky.
Bristol is further West than Bath, so we thought we’d head there first and then work our way back, keeping in mind the shorter daylight hours.
Clifton Suspension Bridge
We managed to find our way through the streets of Bristol to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. This was with the help of Google maps (strongly recommend having data to use maps when needed) and some deciphering of which direction by the navigator in the passenger seat; especially when it came to round abouts and which exit to take. They were much busier here and some, somewhat unclear (ie: no signage in the middle of it). There is limited parking near the bridge, but we managed to grab a space – after triple checking we were in the right space and as to how long we had – then we walked across the bridge.
The bridge is suspended 101m (331ft) high above the River Avon. The bridge connects Clifton, Bristol to Leigh Woods in North Somerset. While the area is quite hilly, the bridge and the park next to it, give quite an expansive view of the area. In the park on the other side of the bridge there is the Clifton Observatory at top of the hill and gives access down through a short cave walk to a viewing platform that over looks the valley.
It was a cold winter’s day but we could still see clearly enough to appreciate the view of the valley and bridge.
Cabot Tower
Next on our list was to find our way from the bridge to a park nearish the centre of Bristol that has a tower where we could be awarded more views of Bristol city. Cabot Tower stands in the centre of Brandon Hill park. We found our way, parked up and attempted to pay for our parking but the machine was not working – bonus!! The park isn’t all that large, so the tower was only about 100m from the street parking. Our walk to the tower was exciting, we came across squirrels, quite a few of them. In fact, they were reasonably ‘friendly’ or just curious, one jumped up on Sara’s leg.
See the next post for the next stage of our Christmas adventure…
S & S
xoxoxo
FitBit Data. 27/12: 10.42KM’s – SRT 16,910; SJT 13,355
* The county of Avon was once the county the Bristol was situated in but in the mid-90’s this county was split into 4 separate counties and Bristol became one of them.