Changes in later times.
The castle. visitor till the key is found. The lesser stream of the Frome has had its course changed and shortened, and the remnant is, like the Fleet of London, condemned by art to the fate which nature has laid on so many of the rivers of Greece and Dalmatia;[1] it runs, as in a katabothra, under modern streets and houses. The marshy ground lying at the meeting of the streams has been reclaimed and covered with the modern buildings of the city. In the twelfth century, still more therefore in the eleventh, this space was covered at every high tide, when the waters rushing up the channels of both rivers made Bristol seem to float on their bosom like Venice or Ravenna.[2] Of the castle again the more part of its site is covered by modern buildings; a great part of its moat is filled up; the donjon has vanished; the green is no longer a green; it is only by searching that we can find out some parts of the outer walls of the fortress, and some still smaller parts of the buildings which they fenced in.[3] But, when the key is once found, it is not hard to follow the line both of the borough and of the fortress. Bristol belongs to the same general class of peninsular towns as Châlons, Shrewsbury, Bern, and Besançon; but, as at Châlons, the height above the rivers is not great; and it is at Bristol made quite insignificant by comparison with the hills to the west and north. Yet on the narrow neck of the isthmus itself, the actual slope towards the streams on either side is
- ↑ One might quote nearer instances in the streams which flow out of Mendip; only they have their katabothra at the beginning.
- ↑ Gesta Steph. u. s. "Viva quoque et fortis maris exæstuatio, noctibus et diebus abundanter exundans, ex ambabus civitatis partibus fluvios ipsos in latum et profundum pelagus regurgitare in seipsos cogit, portumque mille carinis habillimum et tutissimum efficiens, ambitum illius adeo prope et conjuncte constringit ut tota civitas aquis innatare, tota super ripas considere videatur."
- ↑ In what was the castle green is a very pretty undercroft of early thirteenth century work, most likely the support of a chapel.
