Leigh Woods

Now I live in a home with paintings on every wall but in the Gloucester Road house where I grew up there was, for many years only one piece of original art, hanging above the sideboard in the largely unused front room. It was an oil painting of a woodland scene, all greens and browns and dark shadows, at once both empty of people and yet claustrophobic. It hung there throughout my childhood and stayed there for all the time that my parents were alive. My mother said that it was a painting of Leigh Woods and that the artist had been a friend of my father. She said that it had been given as a wedding present.

 

One time my father walked me through the woods and told me that it was a home for tramps, and people living in wooden shacks who couldn’t find a place to live in the city. It was easy to imagine this, in the gloomy late afternoon woods and, then in the dark corners of the picture that hung in our front room.  Nowadays we would recognise those woodland dwellers as homeless, many with mental health and addiction problems, who have fallen through the bottom of society.

 

Although the woods are only a short walk across the suspension bridge, for a young child they felt a long way from home. When I came back to live in the city I walked the woods with their crowded trails; the young families with their buggies; the mountain bikers, and the joggers. I found it hard to recall the dark and empty woods of the painting and my childhood memory, in the other place that lies behind the world that we see. Sometimes I try to imagine the artist who painted the picture and wonder why he, or perhaps she, never came to see the picture hanging in our front room.

 

Enough of this gloomy stuff. After all, this is a tourist guide of a kind, so you you must go and walk the wildwoods that lie just outside the city, on the far side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and find the magic for yourself. Marvel at the views across the Avon Gorge and wander around the remains of the Iron Age Fort.  Walk to the far end of the woods and let your dogs swim in the pools of Paradise Bottom, where you can look at the beautiful trees and find the grotto, which has the charm of a bus shelter but great views across and along the Avon Gorge.  Stray from the main paths with their walkers and mountain bikers and lose yourself in the wonderful urban forest that is Leigh Woods.

 

Do not fear, in 2020 the woods are too well policed for the homeless to attempt another colonisation.  No middle class sensibilities will be offended in this place.