A walk in the park

Adam & I have realized that we’ve spent most of our time talking about our trips and vacations. Probably because they’ve been really cool and we’re excited about them – I mean, who doesn’t love a good holiday! We, though also want to remember our day-to-day living while we live over here. You know, the mundane things of life, going to the grocery store, work, walking the dogs, even the randomness of the television shows. It’s all been pretty entertaining.

So, in an attempt of ‘normal’ – that’s a really hard concept with us! – I want to show you where I get to walk the dogs. I’ve always considered walking the girls a bit of a chore. We usually went after work to run some of their energy out so Adam & I could eat dinner in peace. But I never loved it, they would pull on their leashes, we walked around the neighborhood & about half way through Ginger would get tired & sit down, then there was about 20 minutes of coaxing to get her to finish the walk & get back in the house.

It’s a completely different story here. A great thing about this house is it’s location to a park. We are about a 5 minute walk from Oldbury Court Estate. It is a huge (about 190 acres) of wooded area, open fields, children’s play ground, and football (not the American kind) and cricket pitches.





They have traced the land and estate’s history back to it’s first mentioning in the Domesday Book of 1066 when a riding man is shown as holding a land deed to the area. The property passed through many families throughout from the mid 1400’s to 1715 when it was taken over by the Oldbury’s. They built the first buildings on the property and over time made it a grand estate. In 1799, Thomas Graeme bought the estate and called in Humphrey Repton, the famous landscape designer, who made substantial changes to the character of the grounds around the house. Graeme died in 1820 and the property eventually passed to the Vassall family, relatives to Graeme’s sister. The Vassalls held the estate until 1936 and with no male heir, the last descendent of the Vassall family sold the estate to the city of Bristol.

The city opened the lands up for public use. Then, a fire in 1948 severely damaged the main house and coach house and completely burnt down the stables. By February 1949 the house had been demolished, but the grounds remained open for the citizens of Bristol to enjoy.

Today there are several open grass land areas where you can let dogs off leash. (We’ve noticed that several people let their dogs off as soon as they enter the park area, but we don’t trust ours enough yet!) The girls sure do know as soon as we approach the area where we do let them roam free. And they’re excited about it every time. I have never seen them (especially Ginger) run as much as they do here.







A lot of the times, it’s just the four of us in the area, so Adam & I walk around the border eating off the blackberry bushes…okay, I eat, Adam watches. I never knew how much I loved fresh picked blackberries until we moved here and there are bushes and bushes of them as far as you can see. I’ve thought about picking enough to make a pie or jam or something of the like, but they just seem to keep going in my mouth instead of in a basket to take back to the house…



Occasionally, there are other people or dogs in the area we like, but the girls have done really well at going up to them & sniffing then coming back to us and continuing our walk. We’ve been quite impressed at their manners. It probably doesn’t hurt that they get a t-r-e-a-t when they return to us.





After about 40 minutes of near pure running for the two of them and a slow, meandering blackberry picking walk for Adam & myself, we leash back up and return home…up a hill.