Three miles, bearing to the right, bring the traveller down to the Avon estuary again, at the hillside and waterside village of Pill; a queer little place, clinging and huddling closely to the steep banks, and ending in a short quay, where pilots and other strange waterside folk lean and sit on walls and look across to Avonmouth, plainly visible on the Gloucestershire shore, at the meeting of the Avon and the Bristol Channel; a distant congeries of clustered masts, great warehouses, railway signal-posts, and puffs of smoke and steam: all signs of the great series of docks constructed by the somewhat belated enterprise of Bristol, between 1880 and 1908. The delays and dangers attending the progress of modern shipping up and down the Avon, to and from the docks of Bristol city, have long hindered the expansion of the port, and have left Bristol behind in that race for commercial greatness in which Liverpool and Glasgow have emerged foremost; and now it remains to be seen what the expenditure of millions will be able to effect in recovering tonnage and redressing the balance of missed opportunities. There is a ferry across to Shirehampton from Pill and those eager for light on the subject may readily make the passage into Gloucestershire and satisfy themselves on the spot of the likelihood of Avonmouth’s future prosperity. The rise of Avonmouth, at any rate, means loss to the pilots of Pill, in the diminished call there will be for their services in guiding vessels up and down the muddy meanderings of the Avon. A pleasant land opens out before the traveller who wends from Pill through Easton-in-Gordano (called for short, “St. George’s”) and Portbury, to Portishead, where the open coast is first reached. Portishead is almost wholly delightful. The straggling village is surprisingly unspoiled, considering its nearness to Bristol and the fact that places further removed have been ruined by overmuch building in recent times. There are docks, with an area of some twelve acres, at Portishead, in the level lands below the great bluff of Woodhill and Black Nore, and there is a single-track railway, with a terminus here; but the brilliant future once prophesied and confidently expected for Portishead docks has not yet been realised; and now that the great modern docks of Avonmouth have been opened, there is even less prospect of those of Portishead coming into that predicted success.