DAY 60. I have been very happily invited to join the Winsley Walkers; a lovely group of ladies who get together once a month for a muddy walk and pub lunch. Its very civilised and I'm not sure if the mud is essential to the walk, but its always a feature.
We started off at Claverton and walked in a loop taking in Sham Castle and part of Ralph Allen's ingenious track that he built to transport the stone from the quarry at the top of the hill at Combe Down so that gravity would help to move stone down into Bath. I got very excited to see the original grooved tracks that remain on the long, straight, downhill route to the canal; 300 years old and they are still so clear to see!
I was already fascinated by this picture of how the tracks had been at the time when Bath was being developed into the City that Jane Austen and I have come to know and love. Ralph Allen created a system of pulleys and tram like tracks to overcome the problem of getting large volumes of stone into Bath for the new houses that John Wood was designing and which is now synonymous with the City.
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