Four refrains on the river Avon: An interplay of water and stone
Refrain 1: Notes on tidal movements
Sat, 11th August 2018, Bristol
The Avon is a tidal river. The ebbs and flows of the changing tides imitate the life of man — rising and falling with mesmerising regularity — an extended heartbeat. The sea surges in past the gorge at sundown, raising the level of the river by at least 7 metres. It comes in so fast that I see stalks of grass submerged within seconds.
18:18 pm — Avon River at low tide. The water is rising rapidly.
An inventory of things spotted in the mud:
Old stone blocks
Branches caked in mud
A yellow bicycle frame
Shoes
18:24 pm — The tide continues to rise, swallowing up the dressed stone wall lining the far bank.
18:25 pm — The bicycle frame is completely gone.
—
18:27 pm — I’m in a rather odd place, I should imagine, perched here in the grass just off the road. To my right is the pedestrian bridge across the river into Bedminster.
I’m in solitude, watching the quickly disappearing mud flats, and yet just a few metres away, the bridge is milling with evening walkers.
—
Spaces of solitude and of crowds overlap and intersect through the city. I can see but perhaps not be seen. Vantage point.
—
18:38 pm — An elderly couple on the bridge spot me as I’m crouched coolie-style with my bag splayed in the grass in front of me — inhaling sharply, watching the river, I feel my legs get numb. I see them watching me as they cross, and even at this distance I sense their curiosity or amusement, or both. This vantage point works both ways.
—
18:40 pm — Now the mud bank is completely submerged. Only the retaining wall along the far bank remains, fringed on top by low-hanging grass. There are piles of garbage on the grass under the lush summer bushes. Here along the Avon’s banks we find the leftovers of Bristol’s consumption, the detritus of civilization. I wonder if the water will rise enough to wash them away.
Refrain 2: An interplay of water and stone
Tidal thinking is opening up to the natural rhythms of Bristol’s physical landscape — the rushing up of the Avon is part of the vast theatre of movement that is Bristol. Such massive tidal changes seem so out of place on this muddy, narrow stretch of water that snakes its way through the city’s neighbourhoods almost unseen. It seems impossible to navigate, and yet, the history of Bristol is founded on the river’s tidal movements, and the movement of peoples and goods over it more than 2000 years ago,
Histories record that the Romans first sailed up Bristol Channel and made their way into the mouth of the Avon around the 1st Century A.D (Nicholls and Taylor 1881) By this time, a number of iron age fortresses already existed near what is now Clifton in the western end of the city, overlooking the Avon gorge. The river was navigable (indeed the Romans would sail further past Bristol and eventually found the city of Bath further upstream) but also extremely unpredictable in its tidal movements, and ships were often trapped by the shifting sandbanks when caught in the low tide.
The Avon’s dangerous tides also made docking in Bristol a difficult business, and it wasn’t until much later, in the early 19th Century that locks were built to divert and regulate the flow of the river, and Bristol’s famous floating harbour was constructed. The Avon’s tidal movements were thus directly responsible for shaping the central and most recognizable part of Bristol’s urban landscape — the harbourside that is today the centre of Bristol’s commerce, culture and entertainment.
When we look into the ways in which the physical landscape of Bristol has shaped the city itself, and continues to do so today, we can characterise the city’s history of development as a constant dance emerging through the encounter between water and stone. The Avon gorge itself is an anomaly — it shouldn’t exist. A river always finds the path of least resistance down to the ocean, and this usually means following the lay of the land. Logically, the Avon, cutting across the city from the east to west, should have then turned southwest to flow through low lying country before meeting the sea near Weston-super-Mare. And this does seem to have been the case in the distant past. However, during the last Ice Age, the river’s course veered northward, inexplicably cutting through a series of low limestone hills to form the gorge as it stands today.
What were the geologic factors that forced the river up that way, against gravity and solid rock? Why did the Avon not follow the lay of the land as we might have expected? These are questions geologists are still trying to answer. What we do know is that the acidic clay brought downstream by the river quickly ate through the limestone, the rapid erosion creating a meandering course lined on either side by cliffs, where many layers of limestone sediment now lie exposed, creating a unique new habitat with its own ecosystem and localised microclimate.
“Standing by the harbourside today, from where one can see the colourful stone houses across the water at Hotwells, it’s hard to imagine that they are really just bits of the Avon gorge that were chipped off, reshaped and put together by human hands.”
In this way water cut through stone and tamed the hills. By the early mediaeval period, the small Saxon settlement of Brycgstow that had existed on the north bank of the river had grown into a bustling market town, and humans were also cutting through stone to build their buildings. In the low banks further east in what is now St. Augustine’s Parade, the first stones of the city were laid, quarried from the gorge and brought upstream on barges. Standing by the harbourside today, from where one can see the colourful stone houses across the water at Hotwells, it’s hard to imagine that they are really just bits of the Avon gorge that were chipped off, reshaped and put together by human hands. The city and its landscape are one.
Refrain 3: The Myth of the Avon
There exists a popular legend about how the Avon gorge was formed. In the story, two giants called Goram and Vincent, both fall in love with a beautiful woman named Avona. When pressed to choose a suitor from among them, she decides to set them a task, challenging them to drain the large lake which existed at the time between Bristol and Bradford-on-Avon. Eager to please Avona, the giants get to work digging a channel from the lake towards the sea. Goram soon takes a break, gets drunk and falls asleep, while Vincent hews his way through the limestone hills until he reaches the sea to the north, successfully draining the lake and winning Avona’s hand.
Today the names Goram and Vincent are found all across Bristol — in the names of local ales, shops, parks, and even a Bristol-based ad agency. Floating names that do not offer any insights into their origins, today the founding myth of the city is little more than a marketing pitch, a brand identity.
Refrain 4: The city and the landscape are one
Anyone who has ever been to Bristol will know that the gorge is also home to an iconic feat of human engineering — the Clifton Suspension Bridge that spans the Avon was originally designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but completed after his death and opened in 1864. Today it is an integral part of Bristol’s landscape and identity, its image now ubiquitous on mugs, t-shirts and posters that one finds in all the tourist shops.
Since both Clifton bridge and Bristol harbour have emerged directly as a result of the human struggle against the natural landscape of tidal river and limestone hills, one may argue that they are in fact extensions of the landscape — a reconfiguration of water and stone to accommodate the act of human habitation, that now fundamentally defines the city’s urban character. It is the iconic inscribed within the natural, the architectonic within the geologic. Looking at Bristol not simply as a man-made landscape, but one that has evolved through the symbiotic relationalities between man, water and stone, imbricates our own actions within the larger relationalities of the physical landscapes in which we are embedded. It allows us to see the city as an emergent entity, an outpouring of the earth itself.
