Escaping for a Day

I love my garden, allotment and walking in the local area, but the interest wanes a bit when this is all we can do for months on end during lockdown, so the prospect of the chance to escape, for a day was exciting. When my husband Tim said he needed to collect 3 paintings from an exhibition at RUH by 19 March, my initial reaction was that we couldn't travel from Swindon to Bath legally, but there didn't seem to be an option, and it was 'work', so last Thursday we drove to Bath, picked the paintings up, and then parked in the Lansdown Park and Ride car park. 

Last time we made this journey, when delivering the paintings, and a ceramic piece, we walked down the road into Bath, and enjoyed looking at the different architectural styles and types of housing. This time, we looked for a route at the rear of the park and ride, beyond the playing fields, and easily found the route down to Primrose Hill Community Woodland and from there into Bath via Primrose Hill, seeing parts of Bath I never knew existed, finding ourselves on the Cotswold Way at one point.

It was wonderful to be outside, walking in new areas. I'd left the OS map at home because it didn't have the route I thought we wanted on it, so we were just walking downhill on the way there, and uphill on the way back. I took some photos of the day, starting with the majestic Beckford's Tower, I have 5 photos, but will select the best two, both through the trees:

The views from the hillside are spectacular, but hard to reproduce with a phone camera, I'll include this photo looking over towards Bristol, but not including the spectacular Kelston Round Hill with trees on top, slightly to the right of the photo!

After a while, we stopped going downhill and found ourselves outside Bath Botanical Gardens, behind this impressive gate

It was lovely to see the beginnings of the Magnolia in bloom, probably fully out now, a week later

and here's another slightly fuzzy Magnolia flower:

this tree will now look even more fabulous

This was a vista from one of the bridges

and from there we started to hurry a bit because we had a picture to deliver, and had been dawdling a bit, I think daffodils with maybe the Circus behind looks good

and then on the way back, we came across Hedgemead Park when crossing the road from The Paragon up the steep steps past Gloster Villas and onto Lansdown Road

There's a bandstand, and seen below, a statue

and there was some pale pink flowering currant.

Interesting to see how much you can see on foot, and all the better for being unexpected.