Sunday 14th July 2019



We went for a walk around Avoncliffe before a slow cruise covering the 1½ miles back into Bradford and were, yet again, lucky enough to find a place on the 48 hour moorings. Avoncliffe is a tiny, delightful place and a very popular stop for walkers and cyclists. Around the Cross Guns pub are a few cottages, all staggered towards the river bank and dominated by the Aqueduct. However, looking at signs from the past, it had once been a thriving small-scale industrial centre with water mills and factory mills concerned with the cloth industry. The up-market Avoncliffe Villa apartments bely their past as, first the Bradford Workhouse, then a convalescence hospital for injured First World War troops and later a hotel.

Right our Bradford moorings, down a small embankment, is Barton Farm. The farm buildings are all Medieval and consist of a Manor House, a Granary, one of the best examples of a Tithe Barn and several other buildings. Today, the Tithe Barn is open for visitors, the Manor House is a private residence and the other buildings used for businesses, but remarkably, the whole site was a working farm until 1972.




Barton Farm



From the canalside, the town of Bradford seems almost like a fortified Medieval French hillside town, with its soft Bath stone and buildings scattered up the side of a steep hill. Certainly the place has a quaint feel to it with lots of small, twisting lanes and narrow alleyways all leading off the main road and passing steeply up the hill.   






The Town Bridge is one of the few Medieval pack horse bridges in Britain to have a surviving chapel on it, which was later used as the town lock-up. There a quite a number of old mill factories, all of which would have been associated with the cloth industry and merchants’ houses.



     

                                  
                                                                                           Bradford-on-Avon  
                                            
                                                                 Town Bridge with Chapel and Mill building behind



     





The Church of St. Laurence is largely untouched. This tiny church is Saxon in original dating from about 1001 but could have built as early as AD 709. Its original purpose was only discovered in the 1857 previous to which it had been used as a Slaughter House and as Cottages. Its interior is plain and simple but nonetheless, stunning for this.

         

 
                                      Saxon Church of St. Laurence




 

We had a mid-afternoon Sunday lunch in the Canal Tavern watching the boats passing, it is a very busy spot. It was outside the back of the Canal Tavern, where the first sod for the commencement of the digging of the canal was cut in 1794 and there is an original stone marker in the wall of the pub marking the event.



  












Weather: hot   



Day Total: 0 locks; 1 mile; 0 Tunnels; 0 Swing Bridges; 0 Lift Bridges; 0 Boat Lift; engine running hours 0.8

Overall Total: 560 locks; 1078 miles; 48 tunnels; 38 Swing Bridges; 5 Lift Bridges; 2 Boat Lifts; engine running hours 673.6hrs














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