Priory Street

Hello, "UPON MY WORD".

I love an 'Oh my word' or an 'upon my word'. The knowledge builds, and contributions from others always makes me rethink what I thought I knew. That dotted line on the Bradford map does make me think that it was logical for that to be the original wall route. It doesn't quite line up with the short stretch of wall out of Swanswell Gate but none of the walls were completely true. I certainly didn't find any evidence from the inside of the Swanswell gate to suggest the south side door had ever been anywhere else. I suspect that the dotted line might be a parish type line as well as a pathway, examples of which survived elsewhere as reminders of features long gone even by 1749. I also notice that if you extend the line north from the little bridge you create a three way junction with the original roads from the Cook Street Gate and Swanswell Gate up at the place where the paths cross the out fall from the Swanswell Pool. I'm a firm believer in features in the land being preserved over long stretches in time. Two snippets of pictures of the approximate area of the little bridge. Is it me or was the land on the south of the river increasingly below the river bed? It looks like even the wooden fence around the woodyard was being swallowed between the two dates. Silt deposition and all that.

Hmmm... never noticed that before. Of course, with paintings or drawings one can never be certain how much is artistic license or just poor interpretation, but it certainly does look lower!

Two more pictures for you. The first looks roughly west and you can just see the priory bridge in the distance. The second looks the other way.

These are fab and groovy! They're exactly the sorts of places that most photographers wouldn't dream of bothering about, but thank goodness that someone did document these important little pieces in our city's historic jigsaw.

As with many of the best images of old Coventry, someone was documenting what was there, just before the buildings were demolished. Those two images are part of a collection of buildings off New Buildings that were demolished to make way for more Triumph factories. Including the 'funny little building'. I shouldn't call it little because it was a decent size for its era. It occurs to me that it might date to the demolition of the earlier wall. Medieval builders were very 'eco' friendly and reused what they could, so a decent foundation and a wall that could be hollowed out and reused was common. At the very least that building must have been within the wall, thus setting a limit to where it might have been. I spent a bit more time trying to decipher where the Cox Street gate and walls were. I think I might be almost there. One thing that I'm wondering is if the main channel of the river once it crossed the road, was in exactly the same place it was by 1850. No matter what I do I can't match the buildings outside the gate in 1850 to those in 1749 or even 1837. Or it could just be bad interpretation in 1749 and subsequent maps copied it. I do know that the wall wasn't as far back as the corner of Cope Street and I've identified the building on the left that appears in many pictures of the gate.