Shirehampton

Shirehampton is a district of Bristol in England, near Avonmouth, at the northwestern edge of the city. It originated as a separate village, retains a High Street with a parish church and shops, and is still thought of as a village by many of its 6,867 inhabitants. Although on the far northwest corner, and largely separated from the rest of Bristol by a broad swathe of parkland extending from the Blaise Castle estate, with the River Avon forming a barrier for access to Somerset, the community is still a convenient location from which to reach all parts of the city. Travel is also easy from Shirehampton into Gloucestershire, South Wales and Somerset since it lies within reach of the main motorways in the area, including the M5, the M4 Second Severn Crossing, and the M49, and it is served by the A4 Portway and by Shirehampton railway station, which allow access to near the city centre. It is informally known to local people as "Shire". Shirehampton looks across the Avon towards the rural Failand Hills of Somerset. For many centuries the only direct connection with Somerset was via a small rowed ferry which crossed from near The Lamplighters pub ("The Lamps") to the village of Pill, Somerset opposite. This state of affairs continued until the completion of the M5 Avonmouth Bridge in 1974. From the limestone ridge of Penpole Point (whose name meant approximately Land's End in the Celtic language spoken here before English), there used to be far-reaching views across the River Severn to the distant hills of South Wales, but tree growth has restricted this prospect. The gravel terraces above the River Avon provide some of the earliest evidence of human occupation in the British Isles. Here and around Ham Green and Pill, on the opposite bank of the Avon, humans with a Lower Palaeolithic (earliest phase of the Old Stone Age) culture (possibly of the hominid type Homo heidelbergensis) left tools and debris behind some 250–400,000 years ago.