My Bristol Favourites: Charlie Revelle-Smith

For the past year, author Charlie Revelle-Smith has curated @WeirdBristol, a Twitter feed providing daily insights into the strange and hidden history of the city. From grisly deeds and ghastly hauntings, to curious artefacts and peculiar tales from the past, Weird Bristol exposes the strange and often forgotten history of our city.

Here are five of his favourite weird stories from around Bristol:

Iron-edged pavements

“During the mid- to late-1800s and into the early 1900s many of the pavements around the busiest parts of Bristol were lined with this iron edging. There had been some concern that metal cartwheels and the dragging of metal sledges were causing the historic pavements to be worn away. This solution was implemented in a few streets in Southampton and Leeds, but Bristol is the only city to have its entire old town area decked out in this way.

“It may not seem like the oldest or strangest fact about our city, but it encapsulates my favourite kind of Weird Bristol discovery – the kind of thing you may see every day without even really noticing it, but once you realise it’s there, you’ll start seeing it everywhere!”

This ramp into the Floating Harbour

“When people first see this ramp entering the harbour next to the Ostrich Inn they often assume it was used for launching boats. Its history actually predates the Floating Harbour to the days when the water running through the city was dependent on the enormous tidal range of the Avon. The ramp leads to a cobbled, raised walkway which would be exposed at low tide to allow people (and their cattle) to cross the river to the other side. Parts of the walkway are still visible at the water’s edge on both sides and is estimated to have existed in some form since the 15th century.”

The Quaker Burial Ground

“Opposite St Mary Redcliffe is a burial ground, a former cemetery owned by the Bristol Quakers since the 1700s. It’s believed that hundreds of people were buried beneath this plot of land from many of Bristol’s wealthiest merchant families (despite the Quakers being the first religious organisation to oppose slavery, at one time many of the richest families in Bristol were Quakers who had profited from the slave trade.) At the back of the burial ground is a man-made cave, created at around the same time as the cemetery and was built to house a hermit who would pray throughout most of the day for families who had paid a fee. During the 1950s the Society of Friends gifted this land to the city as a park and to allow the extension of roads in the post-World War Two era. The headstones which were unearthed can still be seen piled up in the hermit’s cave, while the bodies are still buried below the ground…”

Temple Church

“For many centuries it had been rumoured that beneath the foundations of Temple Church lay a much older, circular church which was constructed for Knights Templar, a secretive religious order which gave the area its name (Temple Meads being an Old English term for ‘Templar’s Meadow’). During the Bristol Blitz of 1940 these rumours were proven to be true when a massive bomb destroyed much of the church and revealed the remains of the 12th century Templar church beneath. The circular outline is still visible in the ruins of the church today.”

The Hatchet

“Bristol’s oldest pub, The Hatchet Inn, was built in 1606 and has a rich and often dark history. Most famous (and certainly weirdest) is the persistent rumour that the beautiful, ancient door to the pub was once covered with the leathered skins of executed criminals and that beneath centuries of paint, the skin can still be detected. Many offers to purchase the door have been given over the years, included some for hundreds of thousands of pounds in modern-day money, but all of these offers have been declined.”