Tag name:Bath

Sham Castle and the moon

First published 28th February 2018 (Last Modified 9th January 2021)

I took this picture because it's the clearest view of Sham Castle I've had from the centre of Bath. As a bonus though there's a nice indication of how small the moon in size actually is - it's the small white blob above the castle. I really need to experiment with getting an additional clip-on lens for the phone to see if I can get better pictures of far distant targets than this (zoomed up quite a lot):

Bath Castle

First published 25th March 2017 (Last Modified 24th January 2021)

Today I did a walk from Bath to Bradford on Avon via Bath Castle. I had originally planned to do a circular walk from the book On Foot in Bath by Andrew Swift, but changed course halfway through. The first part of the route, following the book takes you up to the hills east of the city and you arrive at:

Front view of sham castle

This is a nice view of the front - but you should be a bit suspicious as this more side view reveals:

Side view of Sham Castle

This is actually Sham Castle, built in the late 1700s and apparently by the builder of Prior Park 1, even if it's not actually visible from Prior Park! (It is visible from Bath itself if you know where to look (the city is, of course, much more built up than it would have been when Sham Castle was built)).

After visiting the castle, I continued on the walk as described in the book until reaching Combe Down. There, since it was close to Monkton Combe, I decided to divert off of the described route and headed off in the direction of Dundas Aqueduct and the Kennet and Avon Canal.

I was glad I did, since I managed to get to the Aqueduct via a new route which wends its way to the canal from the hills and allowing me the following view of the Aqueduct:
A view of Dundas Aqueduct looking east from above

Footnotes

  1. which is somewhere else around Bath that I'd definitely recommend visiting, though it wasn't on my route today

Bath to Bristol

One of my minor goals has been to successfully walk all the way from Bath Spa to Bristol Temple Meads. My previous attempts have usually involved the Bristol to Bath cycle route (which follows the old Midland Railway from Bath Green Park via Bitton). This route, while flat like most routes that use old railway lines, is a bit long. The SUSTRANS web site claims it's 13 miles, but I think a more reasonable estimate is 14-15 miles based on my experience - though to be fair I've always been forced to break it in the middle at Bitton and detour to Keynsham station (which is a significant-ish detour).

Today, though, I decided to walk along the River Avon to Keysham using initially the towpath (which I would note would actually now be hard to use for towing barges since there are plenty of trees along the actual river's edge once you're outside of Bath). This does meet up with the cycle route, which I used only to cross the river from the North Bank to the South Bank and then followed footpaths along the South Bank (and hence largely following GWR's railway from Bath Spa).

Once at Keynsham though, I checked my phone's map (I use the maps.me app which is based on the data from openstreetmap) and discovered that from there it was less than five miles to Bristol Temple Meads as the crow flies. The computed pedestrian route was six miles (which, as I'm not a crow or a car, is the route I wanted to follow).

It turned out to be pretty straight forward and followed footpaths in the main rather than roads. Usefully Bristol City have recently given most of their paths a hair cut recently, so the paths were only muddy and not completely overgrown!

I didn't stop for food - big meal was planned (and eaten) for the evening - total journey time about four hours and twenty minutes - which probably equates to about 14-15 miles (so I could have just followed the cycle path!).