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Portrait of
a Parish - Page 2
General Description
Thus each part of our parish has something to say about life
in Britain as a whole. For example, in the north, facing the
Claverton Down Road, which rings the city of Bath on its
southern rim, is another large school, named after the founder
of 18th century Bath, Ralph Allen. Unlike Monkton Combe, this
collection of rectangular blocks loudly proclaims its identity
and purpose' a typical example of post-second-world-war
educational architecture. It is built on part of what was once
the Combe Grove estate, a dominant feature of the district for
300 years. The school playing fields run parallel to the
woodlands below; now part of the grounds of the Combe Grove
Hotel and Country Club. These wooded grounds stretch eastwards
from Shaft Road, whose name is another link with the past - the
shaft referred to was one of many from which Bath stone was
extracted for the building of Georgian Bath - to Brassknocker
Hill, at the eastern entrance to the hotel grounds. This eastern
gateway faces a small but interesting group of houses across the
road. One of them was once a coaching inn, the Brassknocker, a
welcome respite for dray horses and wagons which had toiled up
the steep hill, the clinking of the brasses on the harnesses
giving the inn and hill their name. Another of these houses,
Brewery Cottage, is a reminder that the inn brewed its own ale,
as did the Viaduct Inn at the foot of Brassknocker. If we turn
back through Combe Grove grounds, abundant with snowdrops,
primroses and bluebells in their seasons, past the stylish manor
and the new buildings which comprise the modern hotel, and risk
being brained in crossing a nine-hole golf-course, we re-emerge
onto Shaft Road.
A lake, beneath a towering railway viaduct now unused, is
reserved for the sole use of disabled fishermen, and only
birdsong supplements its peace.
General Description:
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