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The confluence of many small streams draining the Cotswolds makes the Thames, but its traditional source, or "The Thames Head," is in Trewsbury Mead, about three miles from Cirencester, and at an elevation of three hundred and seventy-six feet above the sea-level.
As we stand upon the elevations of the Cotswolds and look over "Sabrina fair," the lower part of its valley is seen as a broad and fertile plain, and the Severn's "glassy, cool, translucent wave," as the poet has it, flows through a land of meadows, orchards, and cornfields, with the hills of the Forest of Dean rising on the western horizon.
Within a radius of a hundred miles of London town this is becoming a rare spectacle. They are still used sometimes in the Cotswolds, however, though the practice of using them must soon die out. Great, slow, lumbering animals they are, but very handsome and delightful beasts to look upon. A team of brown oxen adds a pleasing feature to the landscape.
But come what may, or flourish where they please, the empty shells are in time rolled down from trout-stream and chalk-stream, fountain and rill, mill-pool and ditch, cress-bed and water-cut, from the springs of the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, the downs, from the valleys of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Gloucester, Oxford, and Essex, into the Thames.
For here on the western edge of the Cotswolds it is probable that Shakespeare spent that portion of his life which has always been involved in obscurity the interval between his removal from Warwickshire and his arrival in London. On a fine autumnal evening in the year 1592 a horseman, mounted on a little ambling nag, neared the Cotswold village of Bibury.
He seemed to be raised high, looking down on a landscape compounded of the western view from the Cotswolds, and the Weald, and the high land in Wiltshire, and the Midlands seen from the hills above Prince's Risborough. And all this to the accompaniment of tunes heard long ago, an intolerable number of them being hymns.
Pope, writing a century and a half ago, describes it as "a very fine old cross of Gothic curious work, but spoiled with the folly of new gilding it, that takes away all the venerable antiquity." Happily there is no likelihood of the ancient crosses in the Cotswolds being decorated by a coating of gold.
In the days of the first Lord Newton I visited Lyme frequently, and was often late for breakfast because as I went through the passages I could not detach myself from a study of these appealing records. Of houses no less typical of the country life of England I can give a further example without quitting the Cotswolds.
It has just been revived at Painswick, in the Cotswolds, where after being performed for many hundred years it was discontinued by the late vicar. It is the old Saxon custom of "ycleping," or naming the church on the anniversary of its original dedication. Simnels on Mothering Sunday still exist, reminding us of Herrick's lines:
As Horace tells us: "Vivitur parvo bene, cui paternum Splendet in mensa tenui salinum Nec leves somnos timor aut cupido Sordidus aufert." These four villages were all built two centuries or more ago, when the Cotswolds were the centre of much life and activity and the days of agricultural depression were not known.
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