The truth behind the stone ‘fortress’ in the middle of Bristol’s roundabout

There is a large roundabout where the South Bristol Ring Road (or whatever it should be called) intersects the A38, known to earlier generations as Bridgwater Road. In the middle of the roundabout is a large mound of earth in which, visible from one side, is a large stone structure with three large arches and a series of small, rectangular openings.

It looks a bit like the remains of medieval fortifications, but it’s not. Regular readers and others familiar with the footnotes of local history will know that these are actually three lime kilns joined together.

They were built sometime in the 19th century, probably after the 1850s. Whoever built them knew what they were doing.

Read more: Big changes revealed for Bristol’s A4174 ring road

These were located right next to a limestone quarry and made into the side of a small hill, so it was relatively easy to deliver the stone to the top and remove the finished product from below.

The kilns produced lime and quicklime, which were in great demand for improving agricultural soil, as well as for the manufacture of cement and, which is often overlooked, whitewashing. We might think of it as a material that was used to paint the exterior of country cottages, but to the Victorians it was extremely important because of its mild antibacterial properties. Public health workers in Bristol and other cities saw the whitewashed walls as a starting point to make people’s homes cleaner.

Lime production is hard and expensive work. The stone would have to be heated to very high temperatures for three days or more, so these furnaces were also located close to the Bedminster and Long Ashton coalfields.

They appear to have remained in use well into the 20th century, possibly even into the 1930s. During work on the ring road, they were uncovered from a large amount of vegetation and retained as a feature on the roundabout.

It’s not that they were “rediscovered”; many people knew they were there, including surveyors and many local people. A reader wrote a few years ago to say that when the wartime bombing of Bristol began, her father, a builder, had not yet finished making the bomb shelters for his own house and those of his neighbors in Kings Head Lane , Bedminster Down.

The family were a bit nervous just sleeping under the stairs (as recommended if you didn’t have a shelter) so they set off down the Bridgwater Road every evening and slept every night for a few weeks in the ovens to the air raid shelters . were completed.

“The backs of the furnaces were well hidden by brambles and brush,” she wrote, “but you could get in from the front and the piles of ash were quite soft, and we could see the sky through the chimney.”

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