The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

116 THE BEITISH ISLES.
city in ashes, bear witness to the roughness of the Bristol mob.* The imports
include tobacco and raw sugar from the West and East Indies and America,
timber from Norway and Canada, corn from Eussia, spirits, and wine. The exports
consist principally of the manufactures of the town, such as refined sugar, tobacco
and cigars, metal- ware, soap, oil-cloth, machinery, and glass ; for though Bristol
does not hold the first place in any single branch of manufacturing industry, it is
at all events distinguished for the variety of its productions. The coal seams
which underlie the basin of the Avon are not very thick, but they supply the manu-
factories of the town with excellent fuel. The manufacture of cloth, introduced by
Flemish weavers in the reign of Edward III., is no longer carried on by Bristol,
but has been transferred to the Gloucestershire towns to the north-east of it.
Fig. 65.
—
Bristol and Bath.
Scale 1 : 230,000.
V/ofGr 2-20
Bristol proper rises on hilly ground to the north of the Avon, and, like Rome,
is supposed to have been built upon seven hills. The suburbs, however, spread far
beyond the ancient limits of the city. Bedminster, to the south, in the county of
Somerset, now forms part of it ; villas are scattered over the heights which separate
it from Horburi/ and Westhuyy-on-Tri/m, in the north; whilst in the west it has
coalesced with Clifton, which in the last century was a pretty village where the
merchants of Bristol sought repose from their labours. The airy heights which
were at that time dotted over with a few detached villas are now covered with orna-
mental buildings and rows of terraces, stretching round Durdham Downs, and
crowning the bold clifis which here bound the narrow gorge of the Avon. Since
1864 this gorge has been spanned by a suspension bridge, at a height of 287 feet
* Mobcrley, " Geography of Noithern Europe."