The Bristol and Bath railway path was the first major project undertaken by Sustrans. It’s more or less flat of course and asphalt all the way. I didn’t feel the need to continue on into Bristol – this had already been my most urban bike ride this year by far – so I turned around at Avoncliff railway station.
Bath cannot really cope with the volume of traffic it endures and it tends to take a long time to get in and out of, but I do like the drive down the A46 from the M4. The road passes through a village called … Pennsylvania. Wikipedia just gives the Celtic and Latin origins of the two parts of the name (hill perhaps, more likely the surname Penn and woodland) but it’s more interesting to read that it was named by Quakers although I haven’t found enough information to be sure about that.
Near Bath is the ‘soft escape’ lane for out of control cars to get off the steeply sloping road, now covered in weeds.
I happened upon an open air car park at ground level which suited me perfectly as it was right by the river. Instead of actually orienting myself, I looked at OS maps and decided that as long a the water was on my left I must be heading in the right direction. Idiotic. The river takes a sharp turn at that point and the path crosses over. I managed to ride a good three-quarters of a mile before realising my error. No harm done though:
Especially since it gave me this view of ornately Gothic St John the Evangelist church:
To get that far I’d had to get the bike down half a dozen steps. Getting it back up them to return to my starting point was a whole other ball game, but luckily a kind lady helped me – otherwise I could have been there struggling for a while.
I followed the river and a little bit of road to the beginning of the railway path, which is also a sculpture trail. There must be more works further along than I travelled since I only saw this one, which didn’t impress me much.
I preferred these waypoint markers:
It’s mostly a wooded trail with bridges giving splendid views of the Avon.
I liked this mural, celebrating nature and wildlife:
I half wondered if this was sculptural. There was no visible track but presumably there must have been access at some point before nature reclaimed it.
The Bird at Saltford provided a decent plate of nachos (a dish of such simplicity you would think pubs would be able to get it right but very many don’t in my experience).
I rode 13 miles in all, noticing a significant temperature drop as autumn begins, and a bit of light rain to finish. I did try to pick up the River Avon trail for the return leg, going down a very steep path to the water’s edge. It was bizarre: a weird footbridge perhaps with a high steep ramp leading to the water, not easy to negotiate even just on foot and more like a barrier for no reason. A few barges were moored up but there was no sign of a trail on either side of the river. Thinking I’d have to push the bike back up, I remembered what it can do, set the power up to level five and sailed back up instead. That does take it out of the battery though.
En route was this photographic exhibition:
A lovely, smiling tent-dwelling man commented on the noise my brakes were making. I said that at least it meant people knew I was coming and that if they were working at all I was winning, but that squealing does mean something isn’t right and I may have to take the bike into Halfords if I can’t sort it myself.
And this is one of a group of four Cormorants, typically low in the water.
The origins of the name are interesting, from Old French cormarenc, a contraction of the Latin corvus marinus, sea raven, since the birds were once thought to be corvids. Susan Myers in her wonderful The Bird Name Book, Princeton University Press, 2022, quotes Milton describing Satan in Paradise Lost, who flew onto the Tree of Life and “Sat like a cormorant.” And Shakespeare in Richard II where the bird denotes gluttony:
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
Talking of which, the Sparrowhawk has been continuing to take songbirds from the garden. As per a previous post, I am trying to be pragmatic and unsentimental about this. Raptors have to eat too. But I can’t pretend the sight of her ripping up a Great Tit didn’t upset me. I fear she may have taken a Dunnock the other day – I was only aware of a commotion but with her it really is a case of blink and you’ll miss it. The feeders are not emptying nearly so quickly now. I can still hear the Wrens at least. But I have watched the family of Great Tits all spring and summer, the fledglings’ first visits to the feeders and their development into adults.
I’m reading Michael McCarthy’s Fergus the Silent, Youcaxton Publications, 2021. It’s a novel and the first fiction I’ve read for perhaps fifteen or twenty years. I have discovered that it is common to middle-aged men suddenly to stop reading fiction and it came to me out of the blue that it no longer interested me (I hope I never lose my love of poetry though) in spite of my degree and my job both of which centred around English literature. I was led to it by a recommendation in Tim Birkhead’s terrific The Great Auk (The Great Auk – Animal Wild). My first reaction was disappointment with the book itself. As “Youcaxton” suggests it’s self-published. There is no shame in that of course, especially not nowadays. Both of my books are self-published. With Animal Trust that is perhaps obvious, but Animal Wild does not have that about it I think. Fergus the Silent feels a bit cheap, the margins are way off and the covers curl at the slightest provocation. I didn’t think I was going to like it at all at first, but it has grabbed me. Almost a hundred pages in and we are still on a self-avowedly obnoxious protagonist (not Fergus), a budding evolutionary scientist, and his difficult relationship with his girlfriend. Annoyingly I left it out in the rain last night. Since it isn’t a pleasing object, I have now downloaded the Kindle version instead. It reads well. My only real irritation so far was mention of a non-stipendiary fellowship. McCarthy explains that this means “there was no money attached” which I found a bit patronising. Either I know what it means or I don’t, in which case I can look it up. But that’s a very minor complaint about what I am finding a beguiling read.
Amazon also offered me a sample of Patrick Galbraith’s Uncommon Ground, Rethinking our relationship with the countryside, William Collins, 2025. I have read the sample. I will not be downloading or otherwise pursuing the rest in spite of a review by Mark Avery saying that it is pretty even-handed. He clearly despises those heroes of the issues of the right to roam and trespass, Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes, the Ramblers’ Association and assorted others whom he glibly dismisses as communists. Perhaps it’s unfair to say more without reading the whole book, but his mind seems to me entirely closed and on the side of the landowners and gamekeepers. One Amazon reviewer has this to say:
“This is poor journalism and sensationalism dressed up as anecdote. Galbraith, as a fully paid up member of the privileged landed classes, protests too much. If this is all the dirt he can find on the Right to Roam campaign, then I reckon they are doing pretty well.”
The right to roam in Scotland has not resulted in the trashing of the countryside and its wildlife.
“All the same, there is a narrative that access to the countryside in England and Wales is as bad as it’s ever been and it’s often said that landowners and politicians are intentionally trying to exclude us. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were all free men who farmed the fields together and lived sustainably. Whereas currently, it’s claimed most weeks, we are only able to access 8 per cent of the countryside. This is simply untrue. In England and Wales, we have 225,000 kilometres of right of way, which can’t be shut, built on, or ploughed up by any of us, no matter how mighty.”
That’s about as disingenuous as it gets. No one has suggested that everyone lived in a happy idyll before the enclosures, but the land was indubitably stolen, and footpaths really don’t count, they are themselves a form of enclosure, and in many cases there have been hard-fought battles to keep them open. Of course politicians and landowners are not just trying but very much succeeding in excluding the rest of us as they have done for centuries.
I wrote in one of my books: “Nick Hayes in his books which essentially promote the idea of trespass points out that it’s all very well being grateful for footpaths and the right to use them, but as soon as you accept that notion you are also accepting that you are not permitted to roam anywhere else. He reminds us too that in England the public are forbidden from 92% of the land and 97% of the rivers. Whereas in Scotland the right of public access supersedes the rights of landowners to exclude them.“
Anyone who argues against Galbraith is just shouting he says more than once in this short extract and he happily quotes a description of an activist present at the Kinder Scout trespass as “a communist with extreme views” without any evidence. If not communists then ramblers are “just … lots of middle-class people in walking boots drinking craft beer.” He lazily diminishes the importance of Kinder Scout and its reverberations and casts doubt on the idea that land was stolen, then almost immediately admits: “It’s true that for a long time, land wasn’t owned in any sort of way that people in contemporary Britain would recognise.” I’ll stop now before I blow a gasket.
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