Troopers Hill Nature Reserve (Bristol)

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The area that is now known as Troopers Hill is on the edge of Kingswood Forest or Chase overlooking the river Avon. The hill was named as 'Harris hill' on a map of Kingswood dated 1610. A later map of 1672 also shows 'Harris hill lands'.

Local tradition has it that the Parliamentary army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, camped on Troopers Hill prior the siege of Bristol in 1645. It has also been suggested that the ditch between the hill and the allotments was dug at this time as a defensive earthworks. It is known that the army approached Bristol via Keynsham and Hanham and it is possible therefore that Troopers Hill, with its views of the city, was used while the Parliamentary army was headquartered at Hanham, but no firm evidence of it has been found.

Crews Hole became a completely different place in the eighteenth century when the copper smelting industry was established in the area. Copper ore was brought by boat, mainly from Cornwall and north Devon and coal was sourced locally. The copper produced was mostly used with calamine (zinc ore) from the Mendips in the manufacture of brass at Baptist Mills and other sites in Bristol. Many of the brass products were exported to Africa to be bartered for slaves as part of the 'triangular trade'. Abraham Elton established a copper smelting works at Conham in about 1698 and in around 1710 a copper smelting works was established by the Bristol Brass and Wire Company on land between the River Avon and where the Bull Inn now stands. This works became known as 'the Cupolas' and were the main industry in the vicinity of the hill. From about 1750 the Brass Company started casting the waste slag into moulds to produce black building blocks. The best example of the use of these blocks was in the building of the Black Castle at Arnos Vale but they can also be seen in many of the walls around the area. In around 1780 the Bristol Brass and Wire Company moved its copper smelting operations to Warmley having purchased the works of their rival William Champion and by about 1790 the Crews Hole site was abandoned.

The 1790s did not mark the end of copper smelting in Crews Hole; the site was leased to the Elton & Tyndall copper company until about 1796 and Matthews & Arnold had a brass and spelter (zinc) works in Crews Hole in the 1820s. So far we have no records of the use of the site between these dates. A map dated around 1803 was shown to the Friends of Troopers by the late John Cornwell, who ran the Bristol Coalmining Archives and was very enthusiastic about the industrial history of the area. This showed the 'Old Brass Works' where the cupolas were sited but also shows a separate 'Copper Works' adjacent to Troopers Hill. This works is located exactly where the flue from Troopers Hill chimney came down to the riverside. There seems to be no reason to have built the works on this site, which was set back from the river, if it was not to benefit from using the hill. Since the hill and the riverside site were both owned by the Brass Company it seems very likely that the chimney was built to serve this new Copper Works, probably in the 1790s. It is certain that the chimney was built before 1826, since it is shown in a drawing from this date of the view from Arnos Court commissioned by GW Braikenridge. By the end of the 1800s the chimney was being used by Stone & Tinson who had a large works on the site of the copper smelter. It seems that they continued to use the chimney until about the time of the First World War. Butlers took over the Stone & Tinson site in 1924 after it had closed but by then the chimney was disused so it was never used by Butlers.

www.troopers-hill.org.uk/