United States or Kosovo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Not every one who becomes a sojourner among the Cotswold Hills is fated to undergo such a trial as the loss of these ninety elms. And, notwithstanding this severe lesson, I am still glad that I alighted on the spot from which I am now writing. I have learnt to find pleasure in other directions now that my "Eton playing-fields" have passed away for ever.
I made a midnight expedition once last hunting season to see that the "earths" were properly stopped in some small coverts situated on a bleak and lonely spot on the Cotswold Hills. On the way I had to pass close to a large barrow. Weird indeed looked the old time-worn stone that has stood for thousands of years at the end of this old burial mound.
T. Butt Miller hunts three days a week on the eastern side, with Cricklade as his centre; whilst Lord Bathurst has sufficient ground for two days on the west, where the country flanks with the Duke of Beaufort's domain on the south and the Cotswold hounds on the north. Mr. Miller retains the original pack, and a very fine one it is.
At each end of the Cotswold range, as seen from Evesham, stands, sentinel like, an isolated elevation, and in early times, as present remains testify, both these were occupied as fortified posts. To the east is Meon Hill, and to the south-west stands Bredon, the nearest and most prominent of the group.
A few miles away toward Burford is the quarry from which men say Christopher Wren brought some of the stone to raise St. Paul's Cathedral. Yet the local people do not care a bit for this beautiful freestone of the Cotswold Hills. They want to bring granite from afar for their village crosses, and ugly blue slates for the roofs of the houses.
But it is to the part which English hands and hearts have played towards beautifying the Cotswold district that I would fain direct attention; to the stately Abbey Church of Cirencester and its glorious south porch, with its rich fan-tracery groining within and its pierced battlements and pinnacles without; to the arched gateway of twelfth century work, the sole remnant of that once famous monastery the mitred Abbey of St.
I suppose no better fellow or more suitable candidate for a Cotswold constituency ever walked than Colonel Chester Master, of the Abbey; yet his efforts to win the seat under the new ballot act were always unavailing, saving the occasion on which he got in by three votes, and then was turned out again within a month.
You can see to your left and, a long way off, the hill where, as is most probable, Alfred thrust back the Pagans, and so saved one-half of Christendom. Oxford is within your landscape. The roll upwards in a glacis of the Cotswold, the nodal point of the Roman roads at Cirencester, and the ancient crossings of the Thames.
Sense of humour of a kind the Cotswold labourer certainly has, even though he is quite unable to see a large number of apparently simple jokes. The diverting history of John Gilpin, for instance, read at a smoking concert, was received with scarce a smile. Old Mr. Peregrine lately told me an instance of the extraordinary secretiveness of the labourer.
The tactics of a combination of buyers at a sale of household goods, with an arrangement for one man to buy everything they want, so as to avoid competition, is well known as "the knock out." I saw a most flagrant case at a sale of valuable books at an old Cotswold Manor House.
Word Of The Day