Walking on Dundry Hill

Further Info

Volunteers and workers with Community Service Volunteers made stories about some of the work they do.

The workshop was led by Kate Barker, Aikaterini Gegisian and Paddy Uglow and was supported by Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives.

Transcript

I was very lucky that my grandparents lived so close to me. From the age of six, nearly every Sunday, they would collected me and take me out on Sunday outings. We would visit castles, ancient monuments, stately homes, woods, uplands and other beauty spots, from Gloucester to Devon and Wales to Dorset.

It was great fun to play on all these humps and bumps and half-buried walls, but it was my grandparents, with their descriptions of how life and events would have been, that brought them to life.

Sometimes they would get me to look at a tree and think what it had seen in its long life standing there and watching the world go by.

I remember walking fields and streams and collecting wild flowers to press them with my nan to make into cards, and holding armfuls of cowslips buzzing with bees for nan and mum to make into wine. We found all different sorts of flowers, and they would tell me their names and soon I could name nearly all the country flowers and trees.

When I wlak on Dundry Hill, I cannot help but see and enjoy the half-hidden stories of past lives and events.

As I stroll along the flowery banks of Littleton Lane, the names of the flowers I pass appear in my mind without effort. Primroses; yes, if you look closely you can see there’s two different types of centres. Violets, Dogs Mercury, Bluebells, Dead Nettles: if you look closely at their upper petals, you can see that this is where fairies neatly store their shoes in pairs.

The heights of the banks of the lane, overgrown with hedges shout their age, and I can imagine the farm workers and the animals that would have walked along it centuries ago. Children out playing in the lanes, courting couples out on a walk.

As I pass a short tumbledown wall in a field I think, “Ah yes, that would have been used for collecting water for the cattle to drink before Dundry joined the water mains.”

Above the hedges you can see the Mendip Hills rising, with Chew Valley Lake in between. I think of the drowned village beneath, and the stories of church bells ringing on stormy nights, and of the lives and buildings that thrive there.

Looking towards Winford, the stripped fields stand out in the evening light and images of horse and people pulling ploughs through that land long ago spring into focus.

As I walk along East Dundry Lane, I find ammonites lying in the stony fields and imagine the warm, shallow, tropical seas that once covered this area long ago, long before the dinosaurs walked the earth, long before this land was pushed up into the hill we know today.

I think of all the people that drive and walk over Dundry Hill, unaware of how important these ancient fossils are to geologists throughout the world.

I come to a bend in the road, where I can either go on towards a house that belonged to a Snowdrop collector, a sight to behold in early February, Cross Cottage, where a stone cross is part of the building and on to the deserted Watercress Farm [sound of skylarks singing] where the skylarks sing and bright Yellowhammers dash in and out of the hedgerow. Here, the cart tracks and outline of the buildings, and the watercress pools, are so clear you can almost imagine the sounds of the busy farm life here.

I decide to go to the gate instead, and along the track that drops down towards Hartcliffe with a stunning view over the city, Wells and the Cotswolds.

My mind drifts back to a misty winter’s morning with weak sunlight filtering through as I walked this path with friends. As we near a gate, the outline of a magnificent Long-Eared Owl appears out of the mist and silently takes flight only feet away from us.

In a field through this gate, hidden in a clump of tress, is the start of a stream [sound of water flowing] that flows down to the Malago where Dundry Hill group made its mark for the millennium. If you look carefully at the stones in the stream you’ll see footprints of animals carved into the stone. These are animals that walked here from the ice age up to the present day: bears, wolves, voles and even a modern-day walker and his dog, all hidden under the algae. This stream is special. It turns anything that stay in it to long, to stone.

I often wonder, as I walk in the fields and the lanes, what secrets we are leaving today for future generations to find, and imagine what our lives are like.

Credits

All media not otherwise credited created by the story author, or permission obtained, used under copyright licence.

Castle picture created by Danie VDM (flickr.com), used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 licence.

Skylark sound created by Inchadney (freesound.iua.upf.edu), used under Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 licence.

Water created by Hazure (freesound.iua.upf.edu), used under Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 licence.