Bristol Museum & Art Gallery; Clifton Observatory

This afternoon in Bristol, I visited the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and then took a long walk up to Clifton Observatory and Caves. This is another day when I didn’t get started on this afternoon post until relatively late, and I am eager to get through it.

Fortunately, I don’t have much to say about my afternoon activities. It’s not that they weren’t enjoyable. They were. And it was a perfect day for a long walk. The sun shone. The temperature was mild. It was quite a pleasant experience. I just don’t have a lot to say about any of it.

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

The Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is not a huge building. Much of it is taken up by two atriums. Plus, it’s both a traditional museum and an art gallery in the same building. The lobby is one of those atriums. It’s a gorgeous space, with an early airplane hanging from the ceiling.

The museum portion has an Egypt gallery that has relics from ancient Egypt, along with lots of information about life in those times, including their beliefs. For example, according to a sign, “The ancient Egyptians believed that the ba could travel outside of the body, but it had to return each night.” The ba is the person’s soul.

Wait. My soul travels on its own sometimes? My damn soul keeps forgetting to give my Air Canada Aeroplan number. I’m not getting any points for that extra travel. I hope my soul is at least enjoying its journeys. Maybe my soul could write some of these pages. I’m not getting enough sleep.

There’s also a gallery on local wildlife, mostly birds and sea creatures.

Another gallery has a collection of British and world wildlife. I don’t know if the displays are taxidermy or models.

There’s also a small exhibit about dinosaurs.

There might be one or two other galleries in the museum, but I’ve forgotten. Oh, wait. I just remembered (when I looked for pictures on my iPhone photos to include here) that there’s also a minerals gallery.

The art gallery has paintings by European artists dating from, I think, the fifteenth century up to contemporary works. One room displays only works by Bristol painters. There are also some sculptures, ceramics and glassware.

Okay. Enough said. It is a relatively small museum and gallery. And I’m stupid tired.

More photos from inside the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery:

Clifton Observatory & Caves

The Clifton Observatory is almost a half-hour walk from the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. And it’s an almost 50-minute walk from the Clifton Observatory back to my hotel. So, I spent a lot of this afternoon walking. As I said, that was a very enjoyable experience on this fine, fine day.

The Clifton Observatory is atop a hill, a ways away from the centre of Bristol. The observatory is a cylindrical building with a small rectangular building attached to the back of it. The small rectangular building currently houses a café,

At the top level of the cylindrical building, there’s an old, fully functional camera obscura. I paid the small fee to go up.

The climb is on a spiral staircase. It’s the full diameter of the cylindrical building, so it’s not one of those claustrophobia-triggering tiny spiral staircases that you find in some old towers. At a couple of levels on the way up, there’s a small room in the centre of the cylinder where there are display boards with information on the very earliest days of photography and about cameras obscura.

The camera obscura is a lens that rises above the ceiling of the Clifton Observatory cylindrical building. The lens is angled so it faces the ground. It focuses the scene that the lens is pointing at onto a shallow, white horizontal parabolic dish sitting at about waist level in the room where the person viewing it stands. (I was the only one there.)

A handle is attached to the lens and extends down into the room. I could grab hold of the handle and walk around the dish. That changed the direction that the lens pointed, changing the scene that I could see on the dish. The resulting picture was quite clear. I could easily see cars driving along a bridge a little ways away and people on the ground at the top of the hill. It was quite cool.

One of the information panels talked about the invention of portable cameras obscura. Artists used them so they could accurately trace a scene. That sounds like cheating to me.

You might have noticed the “& Caves” in the subtitle of this section, “Clifton Observatory & Caves.” I bought a combo ticket allowing me to go down there as well. The whole experience cost me only £5.

I could have skipped the caves. Right inside the cylindrical building, there’s a set of steep stairs beside the ticket desk that descend into a narrow, rough-rock cave. It’s not so narrow as to be a tight squeeze for one person. However, two people, one going down and the other up, would have had to exhale to squeeze past each other on the stairs. Fortunately, I was the only person there.

Before going down, I had to put on a hard hat. In addition to the cave being narrow, it has a low ceiling. Despite trying to duck a little all the way down, I banged the hard hat on the ceiling a number of times. And I’m not much taller than Hobbit height.

The end of the tunnel was at a platform at an opening in the rock face. The platform looked down on the Avon Gorge. It was a pretty view, but netting that completely covered the opening obscured it somewhat.

As I said, the Clifton Observatory is at the top of a hill. The views from there of the Avon Gorge, Bristol, a nearby bridge, and the surrounding scenery were spectacular.

The bridge is a suspension bridge: the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It’s the same bridge that I could see cars driving on via the camera obscura at the top of Clifton Observatory.

If you read this morning’s post that included my visit to the SS Great Britain, you might remember that
Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed that ship. I said in that entry that he also designed, among other things, bridges, including one in Bristol. I promised that bridge would come up in a future post. This is that future post. The Clifton Suspension Bridge is Brunel’s bridge.

After spending some time walking around Clifton Observatory Hill, taking in the views, and sitting on a bench for a while up there, I strolled back to my hotel to end my day.