During the course of the 1896-97 season, Rovers purchased a 16-acre site on heavy red clay soil, which stretched from the watercress meadows of Eastville along the river Frome to the Stapleton Gasworks and as far as the 'Thirteen Arches' on one of two nearby Great Western Railway branch lines.

The stench from the gasworks behind what was later the Tote End was a familiar experience to hardened regulars in Rovers' years at Eastville and gave rise to the popular sobriquets 'The Gas' and 'Gasheads', by which the club and its supporters have been called even since Rovers' departure from the ground in 1986.

Eastville Stadium, formerly home to the Bristol Harlequins Rugby Football Club, was purchased for £150 from Sir Henry Greville Smyth of Ashton Court, an extensive landowner in late Victorian Bristol. It was 'a ground surrounded with a gasworks, a railway viaduct and a river that always threatened to swamp the ground' (C.B. Fry, 30th August 1919). The Frome, or 'Danny' as it was fondly termed locally, was highly susceptible to flooding and there had been terrible damage caused by rising waters in 1607 and 1703.

In October 1882, just months before Rovers' formation, the Baptist Mills and Eastville areas were reported to be badly affected by flooding. Frederick Hunt, landlord of the 'Black Swan' on Stapleton Road, where Rovers were to be based until 1910, had stated he was ruined, as all his stock was under five feet of water.

There was a fatality, too, as nineteen-year-old Frederick Foot, attempting to deliver bread from Williams' bakery of Lower Easton, was swept away by floodwater, along with his pony, from beside the railway bridge in Mina Road on 25th October 1882. Despite rescue attempts made by three locals and a policeman, both deliveryman and pony were drowned.

More recently, an area of some 200 acres had been flooded in March 1889 as snow thawed and Sevier Street was reported as impassable by 9th March. On 8th April 1889 it was reported that a Floods Relief Fund had raised £11,700. There were to be further problems of this nature in 1936, 1937, 1947 and 1968. In addition, there was water seven feet deep on Rovers' pitch on 21st November 1950, even though the level of the pitch had been raised by six inches the previous year.

The Bristol Flood Prevention Acts of 1885 and 1890 promised a series of schemes but it was to be the Northern Stormwater Interceptor, incepted in 1962 and completed shortly after the floods six years later, which finally solved the problem. Much of the Frome is now intercepted at Eastville and taken underground to join the Avon at the Portway below Clifton Downs.

Rovers thus inherited the 'Stapleton Road Enclosure', or 'Black Swan Ground' in 1897, a ground smelling of gas and sometimes underwater but which included a wooden stand capable of seating 501 spectators, a press box and a small directors' box with cloth-covered seats.

A prompt investment of a further £1,255 ensured cover for the north side with the stated aim of creating a stadium capable of holding 20,000. Entry to the ground was from Stapleton Road for, parallel to the pitch and the river, was a rugby pitch occupied by the North Bristol Rugby Union Football Club.

On 26th March 1897 the club was registered as a Public Limited Liability Company under the name of Eastville Rovers. Just days later, on 3rd April, a crowd of 5,000 watched the Football League and FA Cup double winners Aston Villa take on Rovers in the official opening game at Eastville Stadium. Villa, whose own ground at Villa Park was opened fourteen days later, won 5-0.

Warmley defeated Bristol South End 2-1 before 2,000 spectators at Eastville in the Bristol Charity Cup final at the end of April. Rovers were, however, compelled to play one final game at Ridgeway, Clifton Association, who fielded only nine men, nonetheless winning through two second-half goals on April 24th, while Eastville was being used for an athletics meeting.

It is no coincidence that the electric tramway reached Fishponds in 1897. Since the construction of the first line in Bristol from Perry Road to Redland in 1875, this means of rapid transport and communication had moved progressively closer, with the Horfield section opening in 1880.

The growth of Rovers as a club mirrored the development of east Bristol so that, by the turn of the century, Eastville could boast a thriving society, well-established links with the centre of Bristol and a professional football club competing in the Southern League.

Up until the Second World War, Eastville became a popular venue in the Southern League and later, from 1920, Division Three (South) of the Football League. Like a number of other clubs, though, Rovers played no matches between the end of the 1939-40 season and the start of 1945-46 and one side effect of this inaction was to prove crucial.

The club had no revenue and, although at first the board had strongly opposed chairman Fred Ashmead's unilateral decision to sell Eastville to the Bristol Greyhound Racing Association, the sale eventually went through on 3rd March 1940.

Although the greyhound company had offered more, Eastville had been sold for £12,000. Rovers were granted a lease on 8th March 1940 at £400 per year to continue playing on the ground for a further twenty-one years.

During the war years, Rovers might well have folded, had it not been for the support offered by the greyhound company. In the summer of 1942, the company had suggested to Rovers' directors that the club should begin playing matches again and had offered to meet all financial obligations for 1942-43.

On 19th September 1944, the company's managing director Constantine Augustus Lucy Stevens and secretary John Patrick Hare were voted on to the board, bringing with them a £3,000 cash injection. 1,500 new shares worth £1 each were created and sold through a loan from the greyhound company for a shilling per share to Con Stevens, who purchased a thousand, and Hare, who bought the remainder.

As the matchless 1944-45 season progressed, Rovers' debts mounted. £600 was still owed to the bank, £700 to creditors and £4,700 on outstanding loans and the season's inaction had cost a further £1,000. On 15th June 1945, therefore, Stevens and Hare became chairman and vice-chairman respectively and Charles Ferrari was appointed secretary on 20th August 1945. Effectively, from 29th November 1944, for four years, Rovers became an undisclosed subsidiary of the greyhound company.

On 21st September 1945 Lew Champeny, an employee of the greyhound company and a key figure in the events of 1950, was elected to the Rovers board. Various well-wishers waived more than £2,000 of the unpaid loans and it was with a greater sense of optimism and purpose that Rovers pieced together a side ready for the resumption of League football.

Many alterations had been made to the ground down the years. During the summer of 1924, the South Stand was constructed with seating for 2,000 spectators, as well as a paddock, club offices and changing-rooms.

The betting totaliser was added in 1935, with the effect that the Stapleton Road End began to become known as "The Tote"; a roof was added in 1961 and the totaliser itself was replaced by an illuminated advertising board in 1984.

Floodlights were installed in 1959 and first used for a game that September against Ipswich Town. The capacity of the ground stood at a theoretical 38,000 for a while and the highest recorded attendance was 38,472 for the visit of Preston North End in an FA Cup-tie in January 1960.

By 1974 government regulations had reduced the capacity to 12,500. The ground itself was used for professional athletics, cricket matches, charity concerts, "grid-iron" football for American servicemen in wartime, fireworks displays, circuses and a visit from the Harlem Globetrotters.

Speedway arrived in 1977, rendering the pitch, at 110 yards by 70 yards, temporarily the smallest in the Football League alongside those of Swansea and Halifax. A Sunday market opened in the car park from 1967 and a Friday market arrived in 1972.

Eastville stadium witnessed so many of the defining moments in Rovers' history. It was here that Brighton, Swansea and Shrewsbury were all defeated 7-0; here that Newcastle United had to come for an FA Cup quarter-final replay in the spring of 1951; here that Geoff Bradford's hat-trick against Newport in 1953 ensured promotion to the as yet uncharted territory of Division Two; here that Jarman and Petherbridge terrorised defences; here that Alan Warboys and Bruce Bannister propelled Rovers back into Division Two in the mid-1970s.

Geoff Bradford scored 155 League goals on the ground, including 24 in the 1952-53 season, whilst Stuart Taylor, with 275 games, played in more League games than anyone else on the Eastville pitch. Brighton visited more times - 81 - for a League game than any other opponents. Rovers played 1,279 League games at Eastville between 1920 and 1986, winning 693 and losing 260, scoring 2,454 goals in the process and conceding 1,423.

In the late 1960s, there was a new twist to the continuing development of Eastville Stadium. After much consultation work involving Freeman, Fox and Partners, the M32 motorway was to be constructed to link the city centre with the conveniently close interchange of the north-south M5 with the M4 to London and South Wales. This new 105-foot-wide "Parkway" superhighway, announced at a cost of £15,000,000 by city engineer James Bennett on 3rd April 1964, had led to the demolition of 200 houses.

The Minister of Transport Barbara Castle had allowed work to start on 17th May 1968 on a 2 ¾-mile stretch from Muller Road to Hambrook at a cost of some £3,263,000. On 14th March 1969 a £7,500,000 second phase was agreed, which would overlook Eastville Stadium.

This development finally obliterated the remains of the Baptist Mills Brass Works, a major feature of the area following its inception in 1702 by the Quakers on the site of an old grist mill. A Stapleton merchant, Nehemiah Champion, had been a founder. Abandoned in 1814, all traces now lie forever hidden beneath Junction Three of the M32.

The final buildings and a pear tree appertaining to the Baptist Mills Pottery, a source of great employment in nineteenth-century Eastville, also vanished for eternity beneath the new construction.

There were also more direct implications as far as Eastville Stadium was concerned. An elevated section of the motorway was to cut across the corner between the South Stand and the Muller Road terraces and the hard-shoulder was to attract a steady supply of cars with mysterious ailments on match-days.

"Follow the Rovers", the folk band The Bollards would sing years later, "under the shade of the M32". Eastville's dubious distinction of being the closest league ground to a motorway meant that the noise level became increasingly intrusive.

Rovers' future at Eastville was cast into great doubt following the events of the night of 16-17 August 1980, when a mystery fire badly damaged the South Stand at Eastville. The club's administrative offices and changing rooms were destroyed. Eastville was left as a shell, with seating only in the North Stand and the traffic noise from the M32 motorway now increasingly evident.

It was a depressing situation. Terry Cooper's young, inexperienced side was forced to play three league games and two League Cup-ties at Ashton Gate and, when they returned to their damaged home in October, were so deeply into their club record run of twenty league games without a win that relegation appeared the only possible outcome.

At the end of the 1985-86 season, Rovers drew their final home game 1-1 with Chesterfield; few of those present suspected that this really was a final farewell to Rovers' home since 1897. A moment of history passed by and events over the summer led Rovers towards a decade of exile from the city of Bristol.

In May 1986, to save the club an annual cost of £30,000 plus expenses to hire Eastville, Rovers' board of directors took the historic decision to leave the club's spiritual home.

A groundsharing scheme was drawn up with Bath City, whereby Rovers paid £65,000 per year to play home matches at Twerton Park. The immediate effect of Rovers' departure was that a fourth weekly greyhound meeting could be added to Eastville's schedule, rendering it the busiest greyhound track in the United Kingdom. Twelve acres were sold to a supermarket chain for £2,000,000 plus an annual income of £150,000, leaving a once-glorious stadium a very sorry sight.

After Rovers had moved back to Bristol, the old stadium finally closed down. The last greyhound meeting on October 27th 1997, where entry fees were sentimentally waived, signalled the end of the road for a ground so integral to the club's history.

The arrival on site in March 1999 of furniture giants Ikea did, however, have one saving grace, for the Swedish firm often uses a tall local landmark to advertise its store and a solitary floodlight was left standing as a poignant reminder of the good and bad memories the old stadium would forever hold.

Yet, within a few years, that too had gone, the final floodlight being taken down on 4th December 2003, and Eastville Stadium remains now just a memory of the halcyon days of Rovers' history.

Written by Stephen Byrne