A new album is available on our website showing the progress we made in raising the tree canopy and thinning overgrowth along the South Walk close to the Circle. We’ve made good progress in visually reconnecting the Home Park with the walk and promoting a new sense of openness to the area. A full album of images here!
View towards the House from the South Walk before, and after Sat 18th’s work
We’re running another guided history walking tour of the Kings Weston landscape on Sunday the 26th April. This will be a chance to explore the rich history of the parkland under the expert guidance of KWAG’s chairman David Martyn.
Taking in both familiar landmarks and some of its hidden treasures it’s sure to prove fascinating to anyone with an interest in the estate. Come and discover over four hundred years of history and the cast of the people who led to development of Kings Weston as one of Bristol’s greatest and most famous country estates.
The history walk is one of our regular fund-raising events and we ask a fee of £6 for anyone who would like to join us. The event will start at 10:30 from Shirehampton Road car park and last approximately 2.5 hours. Places on the walk are limited, and please book in advance by contacting us through the details below. Payment should be made on the day. Children under 16 are free and well behaved dogs on leads are welcome.
Tel: 07811 666671 or email kwactiongroup@gmail.com
We’ve finally completed a project we began in January; the steps linking the historic upper and lower paths through Penpole Woods.
The works are all part of a project in Partnership with Bristol City Council and grant-funded by the Forestry Commission to improve access within the woodland. The steps were one of our priorities and we worked with the Forest of Avon Trust to ensure that they formed part of the original bid. January’s 2-day training course was really well attended and over the two days we had more than 20 KWAG volunteers learn how to put the steps together. Our thanks go to Bristol’s Conservation Volunteers, the training they gave us, and for some of their own volunteers who came along to help on the first Saturday.
We continued the work between January and March working through some very hard terrain, and finally completed the 61 step target in early March. The results from the last few month speak for themselves, and we should be incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved as a group.
We’ve got two galleries of images from the project; one with our usual working party before-after photos, and another in our completed projects files. Please take a look and see what you think of the finished project.
A new image has just been acquired of one of the Kings Weston Estate’s 23 individual Listed Buildings. Seen above, this is a pencil drawing of Wood Lodge dates to 1956 and was sketched by local artist, and Bristol Savage, George Holloway. This view looks towards the Grade II Listed building from the east and shows a number of features that have since been lost including the blocked windows and the stone drip-mouldings above others.
The lodge owes much of its ornamental appearance to Philip Skinner Miles during the Victorian era. It was in the 1860s that Miles undertook the refurbishment of a number of the estate’s buildings, including Wood Lodge, and added rustic wood work, decorative barge-boards and a clay pantile roof; Kingsweston Inn Sea Mills Farm, and Henbury Lodge also received similar alterations at this time. However, Wood Lodge has a much earlier origin.
The lodge has always had an important role on the estate; guarding the private parkland to the east from the publicly accessible common land on Penpole Point in the west. It is first depicted on an estate plan of 1772 and is seen in the smaller accompanying image here, by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, in 1788 (Copyright of the British Library). This earlier view shows the front of the building as it would have appeared from the west. What is obvious is that the present building has very different proportions when viewed from the side, and appears to have shrunk from its original width. The projecting bay on the Penpole Lane side is likely to be the same one as seen today.
From the general appearance of the building, and some of the features shown in these two illustrations, it is possible to attribute this lodge to the architect, garden designer, and mathematician Thomas Wright. We know that Wright was working on designs with Edward Southwell III of Kings Weston House from 1761 and there are strong stylistic similarities between Wood Lodge and some of his other work on the Badminton Estate, Gloucestershire and Tollymore Park in Ireland. At what time the building was so drastically altered it’s not known, and although the thatch has a far more picturesque effect, its present tiled roof must be far easier to maintain!
