I was in Bristol for a few days this week, and one afternoon between rain showers went for a walk across the Downs – a large open area of grassy "common" land – to the most northerly and steepest part of Whiteladies Road in Clifton, known as Blackboy Hill, named after a pub that is no longer there. It's a curious pairing of names in these days of sensitivity about race and the slave trade, especially in Bristol, but it would be sad to see them abolished in a fit of retrospective rectitude. You can't change history, and in my view you shouldn't make token attempts to cover up the sins of the past: let's keep them in plain sight so we can learn from them, not pretend they didn't happen.
Anyway, I decided to do a little exploration of an area just off to the western side of the main thoroughfare, a warren of steep little streets I had never really ventured into before. A lot of Clifton is made up of imposing Georgian terraces, once very grand residences for the wealthier citizens, but now mainly converted into flats. When we lived in Bristol in our post-student days in the late 1970s, the area was very run-down: I have mentioned before the flat I rented for a while at the very top of such a terrace within a minute's walk of Brunel's famous suspension bridge, which was so cold that the toilet bowl actually froze in the winter of 1980/1. Mind you, my future partner's flat in a similar Clifton terrace – originally just one mid-level room with an enormously high ceiling divided into two rooms with a rudimentary galley kitchen – had no toilet at all: there was a shared bathroom down the stairs on a landing between floors. Gentrification has since worked its magic in the subsequent decades, however, and the whole area has been transformed into an estate agent's dream: the very large terraces that line the sides of the Downs are referred to as "millionaire's row".
But the streets to the west of Blackboy Hill are not like that. They are narrow, short, and steeply sloping, lined with small terraced cottages and infill buildings of various vintages that are now mainly occupied by characterful folk, ostentatiously subcultural in their tastes, who must have bought them back in the days when property around there was rather cheaper. Wandering through them, I came across a side passage named Quarry Steps, which was intriguing, so I followed it, and found myself at the top of a long and precipitous set of steps that had presumably once led down into a quarry, but which was now a very large depression filled with more little streets. It was like looking down into a village hidden in some secret valley, with its horizon dominated not by mountains but by the rear view of the Georgian terraces ranged above. Naturally, I went down to explore further.
I was doing my usual photographic thing – looking for the curious juxtapositions and accidental compositions that abound in such neighbourhoods – when I turned a corner and was stopped in my tracks: Whoah! At the far end of the street was a massive, ruined structure that would not have looked out of place in some swords-and-sorcery fantasy film. It looked like the exposed dungeons and cellars of some demolished castle, stretching up some thirty or more feet, on top of which the back gardens of a tall multi-storeyed terrace were perched perilously. Walking closer, it loomed ever higher, until I was standing in a narrow street, literally a few yards from this spectacular wall of overgrown masonry and brickwork.
A young guy happened to come out of a front door, heading to his car, so I asked him, "Do you have any idea what that is?" He said, "No, no idea, I've only lived here for a year". Which struck me as remarkably incurious, not least because the crumbling cliff of masonry brooding over his residence had Danger! Hazard Area! Do not enter! signs posted all over it. I think it would have been one of the first questions I would have asked, probably ahead of "what day do the bins go out?" but definitely after "have there been many rockfalls recently?"
Anyway, a little web browsing later on revealed that it is, as you might expect, a remnant of the quarry that had once filled the area. It must have been a mighty enterprise in its day to warrant this kind of superstructure, more appropriate to a mine or some military edifice, although I suppose ensuring that the posh folks' houses up above didn't topple into the workings down below might have warranted it, too.
One unexpected claim to fame is that the area is a geological "site of special scientific interest" (SSSI), as the first fossils of the dinosaur Thecodontosaurus were found here in 1834.
Description and Reasons for Notification:
Quarry Steps shows a fissure deposit which is in effect the last remnant of an extensively quarried area (Durdham Down) where the first reptile-bearing fissure deposits were discovered early in the 19th Century.
Two species of the saurischian dinosaur Thecodontosaurus, a phytosaur and two species of sphenodontid lizards have been found in fissure fillings of presumed Rhaetian age.
A key site in studies of reptilian history and environments during the early Mesozoic of Britain.
(English Nature citation sheet for the SSSI site)
A "fissure deposit", since you ask, is exactly what it sounds like: stuff, including animal remains, that has ended up in holes in older, pre-existing rocks. Typically in south-west England with its limestone landscape these would have been caves and "grykes" into which water had carried deposits from the surface. Grykes, since you ask... Oh, look it up. Did I ever mention I have an O-level in Geology?
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;This masonry is wondrous; broken by fateburgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.courtyard pavements smashed; the work of giants is crumbling.Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,Roofs are fallen, ruinous are the towers,hrim geat torras berofen, hrim on lime,the frosty gate with frosty mortar is ravaged,scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene,chipped roofs are torn, fallen,ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafaðundermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesseswaldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,the mighty builders, perished and fallen,heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cneathe hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generationswerþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebadof people have departed. Often this wall,ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,lichen-grey and stained with red, one reign after another,ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.remained standing under storms; the lofty gate has fallen.(from "The Ruin", an Anglo-Saxon poem in the Exeter Book) [1]
Standing in that street, it's easy to imagine the awe that ruined Roman structures in Britain would have inspired in recently-arrived Anglo-Saxon settlers ("The Ruin" is generally thought to describe the remains of the hot-bath complex in the city of Bath). Today, nobody builds with the boldness, skill, and attention to detail of those 18th and 19th century builders: this was just a quarry, after all, not a town hall or a bank. The work of giants, indeed.
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