Gardener’s World meets Time Team
Roy Gallop
Roy finds more than he bargained for when he digs up his veg in this four minute film of a south Bristol allotment-site situated on an old industrial area.
Transcript
Gardener’s World meets Time Team. Alderman Moors Field, the City Allotment, was created from an old industrial site in Ashton Vale in the late 1930s. My plot, which is now an orchard is on what was the site of several heavy industries: coal pits, iron works and brick works.
Alderman Moors Field is on the south-western city boundary and due north is Clifton and Brunel’s famous suspension bridge. To the north-west is Ashton Court, once home to the Smythe family who owned all this land and the mineral rights. They were instigators of the mining in Bedminster and Ashton in the mid 18th century, and other industries quickly followed. Starveal pit would have been 200 yards from my plot. It closed many years ago.
The waste tip, however, was cleared in the 1970s and the youth club was built on the site.
Below Bedminster Down, close to the main railway line, was South Liberty Lane Colliery and Brickworks. The colliery closed in the late 1920s.
My great uncle Jim owned a timber-haulage firm bringing felled trees to Bedminster Timber Yards from the Ashton Court Estate and Ashton Vale. He followed his father from the age of eleven or twelve and is seen here early in the 1900s putting sacks on the hooves of Prince to avoid slipping on the frosty ground. He continued to use horses until the Second World War.
East of my allotment was once a steel rolling mill and furnace. The eastern boundary of the allotment is formed by the railway line, built by the old Great Western Railway, to Portishead through the Avon Gorge. Quite recently, new track has been laid and opened to Royal Portbury Dock. The main freight is now cars from Japan, and coal.
The line is occasionally used for steam special excursions.
Ashton Old Pit, and later the New Pit were very near the Ship and Castle public house and the Bristol City football ground.
When I dig my plot, I find artefacts from the not-too-distant industrial past. Numerous shards of stoneware drinks bottles come out of the soil where there was once a steel rolling mill and furnace. I sometimes wonder who was the last miner who used this discarded shovel and that very worn pick head.
Clay pipes were easily broken, and used until the bowl was uncomfortably close to the cheek. They are very common finds. The top broken pipe bowl dates from the late 18th century.
On this large squash sits a pair of miner’s steel toecaps. They were found together. The boot have long rotted away. Below, on the picnic table, are small iron items: a T-shaped key, a rivet, a bolt, and other undefinable iron objects.
Slag is a waste product of iron smelting. It is very dense, very hard, like black glass. Another waste product is gangue: this forms as a scum on the top of the furnace. It was full of air and very light. Today it is used as a by-product to make insulation blocks.
These are just a few of the many items I have found on the allotment site. I collect them as a kind of memorial to those mostly-forgotten iron-workers, brick-workers and miners who worked above and below this now beautiful and productive site.
