Andrew Swift commemorates 100 years since St Anne’s Wood officially opened by reflecting on its historic significance and exploring this green, wooded pocket of Brislington as it is today…
This month Bristol marks a notable centenary. At 6.30pm on 13 June 1924, several thousand people attended a ceremony marking the official opening of St Anne’s Wood in Brislington. The valley in which the wood lay had been gifted to the city two years earlier, and since then a transformation had taken place. Winding paths had been laid, flights of steps built and undergrowth cleared. The Brislington Brook had been reconfigured to run over weirs and around islands, and it was spanned by several rustic bridges. Many of the speeches delivered that fine spring evening, though, focused not on the prodigious work that had been carried out or on the natural beauties of the site, but on the distant past – for this quiet valley was one of the most historic places in the city.
Around 1276, a small but lavishly appointed chapel dedicated to St Anne had been built at the edge of the wood, near the confluence of the Brislington Brook with the River Avon. St Anne was the patron saint of mariners, who invoked her name to protect them on voyages, so the chapel was naturally much resorted to by Bristol’s seafarers. Some of the city’s guilds also venerated St Anne, as did pilgrims from farther afield, the most notable of whom was Henry VII who “roode on pilgrimage to Sainte Anne’s in the Woode” in 1485. Just over 50 years later, however, the chapel was dismantled by order of his son, Henry VIII, during the dissolution of the monasteries.
A pottery was later established in the ruined building, but after it closed the chapel fell into total dereliction. The site was eventually redeveloped and today lies under the business park that stands at the entrance to the valley.
The holy well
Three hundred yards south of where the chapel once stood, though, is a holy well. It may well have been revered since earliest times, and may even have been the reason the chapel was built nearby. The first reference to it, however, only dates from around 1890, when Father Ignatius Grant of St Mary on the Quay Roman Catholic Church said that members of his congregation were in the habit of visiting the well, especially on St Anne’s Day on 26 July. One of his congregation, who had a cataract in his left eye, went on to explain that he “was afraid of the other becoming affected, and he visited St Anne’s Well because he thought that the water from that holy well would do his sight good”.
The reason their testimony was recorded is because it was delivered in a court of law. Six years earlier, St Anne’s Wood had been bought by a solicitor called James Sinnott. The footpath through it, which ran past the well, had always been a right of way, but Sinnott closed it off and erected gates to prevent access.
The council’s sanitary committee lamented that it was “a thousand pities that this beautiful spot should be closed against the public”, but didn’t see what they could do about it, and calls for the council to buy the land were turned down. In response to widespread anger, the Bristol & District Footpath Preservation Society agreed to organise a mass trespass, provoking Sinnott to take the organisers to court. The case lasted 18 days, and, after numerous witnesses confirmed that the path had been used since time immemorial, Sinnott was ordered to remove the gates, reopen the footpath and pay the costs of the hearing.
In 1918, he decided to put the wood up for sale. There were no takers, so four years later he offered it to the council, on condition that two new roads were built. As the value of the land was around £400 and the cost of the two roads would be over £10,000, it turned the offer down. At which point, a local historian called Frederick Jones started a campaign.
“No other wood or valley in the neighbourhood of this old city, has such charming verdure, no such historic associations,” he declared in one of his letters to the press. He played the heritage card for all it was worth, claiming that “to this holy well, consecrated by the monks in the thirteenth century, and second only in fame in medieval Europe to the shrine of Canterbury, came all the kings of England.” He may have had a cavalier approach to history, but Jones also had the ability to make people sit up and listen, and before long the council was negotiating with Sinnott.
Opening the long-hidden valley
Once a deal was agreed, the council set to work putting its new acquisition in order. The southern part of the wood, shown on old maps as ‘Nature’s Garden’, had never been open to the public. It had been laid out as a botanical garden, and it was this area that the council concentrated on enhancing and making accessible for the hordes of visitors Jones assured them would come.
The grand opening came less than two years later, and this long-hidden valley soon became one of the city’s most popular green spaces. In 1929, the holy well was restored and given a protective canopy, and in 1933 a pilgrimage to the well, organised by the vicar of St Anne’s, Brislington, “presented a brilliant picture of ecclesiastical pageantry with the gold and scarlet of the banners, copes and vestments, the flickers of the lighted candles and the gleam of the censers”. The choir was accompanied by the East Bristol Temperance Band and several hundred people turned up for the ceremony. It became an annual event, and within two years had grown so popular that more than 400 people joined the procession to the well, where “a vast crowd awaited their arrival”.
After an interregnum during the war years, the pilgrimage continued until 1975, when devastation caused by Dutch Elm Disease made the wood too dangerous for a service to be held there. It was revived, however, in 1986, and, more recently, other celebrations have been organised. These have included community pageants, festivals, and nature workshops, while local groups have made great efforts to protect and enhance this wonderful natural space. New ornamental gateways, plaques and pathways have been provided, making this once forbidden enclave accessible to all.
Entering the wood today, the noise of traffic fades as you wander through a broad meadow, with the brook burbling past and tall trees on either hand. After passing the well, where ribbons hang from trees, the path leads across the brook, the sides of the valley close in, and you come to the enclave once known as ‘Nature’s Garden’.
Rough tracks curve away into grassy banks. Steep steps climb upward to disappear amid the trees. Many of the features introduced in the 1920s, such as the canopy over the well, have long since disappeared, nature has reclaimed what was once tamed and it feels as though you are discovering a lost garden.
When you finally reach the end, and the brook disappears into a culvert under Brunel’s Great Western Railway, a further delight awaits, however. Climbing out of the valley and following the road over the railway, you can drop down a rutted track into Nightingale Valley, only saved as an open space after a lengthy campaign in the 1970s, to follow the Brislington Brook southward for a further kilometre.
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