Bristol Walks ✦ Wick Quarry & Golden Valley Nature Reserve

If you haven’t been exploring down at Wick Quarry, you need to put it on your ‘sunny day’s out list’! We seemed to be one of the lucky few who didn’t wake up hungover on Bank Holiday Monday, so we headed out on an adventure in the 27 degree heat! A friend had put an Instagram story up at Wick Quarry and it looked beautiful, so we decided to go down ourselves and explore.

 It was a half an hour drive out of Bristol for us, though we weren’t really sure where we were going! Once in the village of Wick, you can park at the Village Hall and follow the signs for Golden Valley Nature Reserve – we found this out by googling whilst pulled over not entirely sure where we were going! 

We followed the signs and headed down a tree lined track alongside a river. It was so beautiful! It is a perfect place to walk your dog if you have one – I wish that we did! The river wasn’t deep at all and lots of cute dogs were running around having a great time. As you can see from the photographs, the trees lining the paths created a canopy above us – it was so green! Although Bristol as a city is very green, it was nice to feel like we were properly in the countryside. 

We crossed the river and got to a sign where we could go left or right down two different paths. We took the track to the right alongside the river, which was pathed with brown clay mud that sparkled in the light. At the end of this track we came to a waterfall/weir which you could walk up steps next to and look at from above. 

We then carried on up a steep path and came to the most amazing view of the quarry through the trees – it was incredible. The water is the most amazing blue colour against the pink hue of the clay mud. 

Further up we then came to a meadow, which led down to another viewing area of the quarry, this time from slightly lower but much more was visible. There was lots of places to sit too, which were right in the sunlight. 

After this we went back up to the meadow and walked through it down the hill back to a path. Here we got a bit lost (there were a couple of turns were we went down the path that looked the most fun, and least path like..) and ended up on a road but only had to walk round a couple miles back to where we parked which was still lovely as it was right out in the countryside. 

I’ve since had a look on the website and realised that I think we did the longer walk but the wrong way round, hence getting lost at the end! So if you don’t want to get lost, maybe familiarise yourself with the walks here before you go! If you have a spare few hours on a sunny day, definitely head down and have a look for yourself – it’s a lovely walk with beautiful views! 

Charlotte Rick x