Few situations command so varied, so rich, and so extensive a view as THE FORT; situated on the summit of a hill which looks over the vast city of Bristol, it formerly surveyed the river, and the beautiful country surrounding it, without being incommoded by too much view of the city itself: but the late prodigious increase of buildings had so injured the prospect from this house, that its original advantages of situation were almost destroyed, and there was some, reason to doubt whether it could ever be made desirable either as a villa or as a country residence; because it was not only exposed to the unsightly rows of houses in Park-street and Berkeley-square, but it was liable to be overlooked by the numerous crowds of people who claimed a right of footpath through the park, immediately before the windows. It was, therefore, as public as any house in any square or street of Bristol. If the earth had been simply put back to the places from whence it had been taken, the expense of its removal would have been greater than the method which occurred to me as more advisable; viz. to fill up the chasms partly, by levelling the sides into them, and raising a bank with a wall to exclude the footpath, as shewn in the annexed section [fig. 38], where the dotted line shews the original shape of the ground; the zig-zag line, holes from fifteen to twenty feet deep; the shaded line, the shape of the ground as altered.
