A Guide to Bristol from Antipodal Dunedin

We gather from this curious book, Webster’s Timeline History: Bristol, 1000–1893, that the city is riverine, located inland, but that its outlook is maritime, running on coastal tides—so much so that in days of yore, the lower reaches of the town were repeatedly flooded to the rooftops by storm tides from the Bristol Channel surging up dramatically between the banks of the River Avon. An ancient settlement site, built on seven hills that climbed from marshes and wetlands now drained, Bristol originally straggled along a skein of streams and waterways that were gradually coaxed into rivers and canals able to transport barges and ships. Boggy, soggy Bristol was once Albion’s riposte to ancient Rome, if not to rivalrous London.

The word “Bristol” constantly sounds out as an invocation to spirits of place, somewhere between a prayer and a swear word, giving Professor Parker’s pedagogy a phantasmagorical quality, as if Bristol itself were a cabin-fever dream of flotsam and jetsam floating past on the surface of murky waters—a jumble of personages, declarations, proclamations, drums, trumpets, and battle flags.

Yet, as in a fever dream, Bristol is not the answer; rather, it is a kind of riddle, or an absurdity of random-information overload. This is Bristol posed as a pedantic Polonius, tittering, concealed behind an arras, and waiting to be run through by a bare bodkin in some Merrie Olde England production featuring Hamlet the Dane. This is a papery Bristol, pinned like a butterfly to a board, crumbling to sneeze-worthy dust. Professor Parker’s long and winding road of paragraphs also twins this Bristol Channel Bristol, confusingly, with other more diaphanous Bristols, located in North America. There is no one true Bristol; rather, all is shape-shifting vapor and skimmed data smog. It is erasures, absences, ellipses, resembling concealed trapdoors, priest holes, and smugglers’ staircases leading nowhere: Bristol as nebulous maze.

Bristol also has aspirations as palimpsest, as mnemonic. The word “Bristol” tolls the hours, and the mystique of the name summons ghosts that might be illuminated by the flaming brands of the town’s officious midnight watch, century by century. Imagine a drastically altering townscape growing backward in time toward Neolithic beginnings, where an anchorage and a bridge glimmer through early morning fog and mist by a river crossing. Soon, a fort and then a castle command the heights; and here the timeline begins to sparkle with glimpses of goods being marketed and traded. Dykes are dug, forges are built, coins are struck, sword hilts are raised, and rulers are deposed. Clashing their goblets of mead, Empress Matilda and Queen Matilda go head to head, while King Stephen of England, related to both, dances his own galliard between them. Many bishops preach many sermons.