What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
Yes – This, too, is Cirencester! this is the annual Phoenix Festival, held in the Abbey Grounds right next to the Parish Church. The Phoenix is an old Cirencester emblem, and the name seemed a natural one.
Saxon forces defeated Romano-Britons in the year 577 CE and the old Roman town of Corinium was sacked and destroyed. Cirencester rose from the ashes like the Phoenix and this might be the reason for the association; but there are other plausible explanations.
However that might be, the Phoenix Festival is popular locally and is free of charge. As you might expect, in addition to the music there’s a selection of vans serving food and drink, and the event has a relaxed, family atmosphere. It’s held on two consecutive days in late August. See you there next year?
Oh, by the way, Cirencester’s Phoenix Festival is not to be confused with the Phoenix Festival once held annually near Stratford-on-Avon. That festival was a rival to Glastonbury, very big with world-class bands and notorious for crowd troubles and bad behaviour.
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Beyond the lock is a canal basin, currently just an area of grass at a lower level than its surroundings. And beyond the basin is the bridge that featured in an earlier image.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
We return to the village of Siddington for today’s image, just a couple of miles south of Cirencester. You can see the brick-built remains of a canal lock, part of a ladder of four locks at this point. Beyond the lock is a canal basin, currently just an area of grass at a lower level than its surroundings. And beyond the basin is the bridge that featured in Image of the day 61.
Although derelict right now, work to improve things has already begun here. Trees growing in the canal bed are being cut down, the towpath is getting some basic care such as filling holes and repairing serious erosion. Down in the western part of the canal in Stroud the section connecting to the Stroudwater Canal is in water and navigable; and within the next two or three years the Stroudwater itself will be connected to the rest of Britain’s canal network at Saul Junction near the River Severn. Focus is moving now to Lechlade in the east where the canal joins the River Thames, and also to the area in the Cotswold Water Park, near South Cerney and Latton. As the Lechlade section develops further, boats will be able to access the canal from both ends, but it will be decades before it becomes possible to travel the entire length by boat.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Of course, non-local companies are far, far better than empty shops. Cirencester has fewer empty shops than most towns; and we do have a good proportion of small, local businesses springing up all the time.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
This shop was Stradlings when I was a child. It was a watch, clock and jewellery business and had been a clock maker at one time. If you enlarge the image you will see a clock between two first floor windows on the left. That clock is marked ‘Stradling maker Cirencester’, a relic and reminder of times past.
Businesses come and businesses go, that is normal, it has always happened. But something has changed dramatically in Cirencester as in towns across the county (and indeed much of the world). And it’s this – many of the incoming businesses are branches of large companies, often with little local knowledge or experience.
Of course, non-local companies are far, far better than empty shops. Cirencester has fewer empty shops than most towns; and we do have a good proportion of small, local businesses springing up all the time, especially restaurants, coffee shops and so forth. But the trend is clear, especially when you take the long view. I’m 76-years-old, but as a child almost every business seemed to be local. Perhaps the biggest exceptions were banks and building societies. Sometimes, it’s even in the names, ‘Nationwide’ is indeed a nation-wide building society!
But despite all this, many of the old names, like Stradlings, have left visible mark that can still be seen if you look closely enough. The old clock is still on the wall – a clock made in Cirencester! Not far from Cotswold Contemporary, the current owners of the clock, you’ll find an old sign above a shop front on the same side of the street. There are no words, just a black teapot and a cup and saucer. If you are ever in Cirencester Market Place, see if you can spot it, another emblem of the past. I won’t mention the current name of the shop, that would make it far too easy; but I will say that back in the day it was Anne’s Pantry. They sold little cakes, dainties and pastries to take away, or you could take a table inside for a cup of tea.
If you find the teapot or have memories of Cirencester to share, leave a comment.
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
If it’s raining you’ll be looking for an umbrella or zipping up your waterproof coat, in the sunshine you’ll be glad of the shade while enjoying the clear sky.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
The Riverside Walk runs from Thomas Street (near the junction with Cecily Hill) to the north-western end of Gloucester Street in Cirencester. It crosses the Barton Mill pound, although the mill itself was destroyed in a fire in the 1920s.
This view is from the bridge across the mill pound looking towards the site of the old mill. Riverside Walk is a favourite for Cirencester people walking or cycling from the town centre towards Stratton. It’s a peaceful place to stroll, one end surrounded by fine, old Cotswold stone houses, and the other with a view over flood meadow, and the path is accompanied by water for the entire length.
At the halfway point this footpath crosses Barton Lane, with access to Cirencester Park to the west and Gloucester Street to the right. A lovely part of the town.
What will you think about as you walk this lovely footpath? If it’s raining you’ll be looking for an umbrella or zipping up your waterproof coat, in the sunshine you’ll be glad of the shade while enjoying the clear sky. If you are lucky you might see the kingfisher, the heron, the little egret, or a red kite passing overhead. All are regulars here, though you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled.
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
This is one of Cirencester’s wonderful old hotels, ‘The Fleece’. It has a long history in the town, and its appearance is especially interesting. It looks like a timber-framed building at first glance, and at least one upper level has a visible overhang, a typical feature of multi-storey timber frame construction. But a closer look shows that the building has a render finish, and the ‘timbers’ are created with black paint on the render. Nonetheless, I can’t help wondering if there are real timbers underneath the render, it actually seems quite likely! If so, the render and the painted ‘timbers’ would be a sort of double-bluff. How intriguing.
Whatever the truth about the timber framing (or not), this old inn would have been part of the coaching network before the coming of the canals and railways. Passengers and their luggage would have been carried from here to Burford, Oxford, London and other destinations. The Fleece is 300-years-old and Grade II listed.
Today, the business has expanded into the properties either side, but to my knowledge the central part still looks exactly as it did 70 years ago.
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
In this image you can see bending in several directions over just a few hundred years – 300 or 400 hundred at most. Look out for similar effects in old town and city streets, castles, churches and cathedrals.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
How about another wonky house? This picture shows a stone-built structure here in Cirencester’s Coxwell Street. Unlike timber, stone doesn’t warp or bend in changing climatic conditions; however it does respond to persistent pressure over long periods of time by gradually distorting.
This is often seen in geological formations where sedimentary rock layers may be curved in large, wavy patterns even though they were completely horizontal when deposited millions of years ago. The same can happen in masonry, but foundations (if any) and the mortar between stones may also deform and contribute to the effect.
In this image you can see bending in several directions over just a few hundred years – 300 or 400 hundred at most. Look out for similar effects in old town and city streets, castles, churches and cathedrals.
Look out for bent stone on a much larger scale in cliffs and quarries.
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Notes from bygone years – October (Noctober after dark?). Hint: Click on the thumbnails for larger images.
October 2023 (1 year before publishing this article)
Text from a Herculaneum scroll
An exciting scientific paper published in the journal Nature described how X-ray data and clever data manipulation had made it possible to recover small scraps of text from scrolls lost when Vesuvius erupted in October 79 CE. Hope was expressed that it might become possible to recover much larger sections of text, or even whole scrolls.
Our cat, Erin, was not feeling well; due to a tumour she was not eating very well and often threw up afterwards. She was losing weight quickly as a result. The vet suggested a steroid injection to see if it would help her cope better, but it would clearly be only temporary relief. It seemed well worth a try and during the second half of the month she seemed very much her old self again.
We visited Westonbirt Arboretum on 23rd October to enjoy the autumn colours, and Donna’s Uncle Ken died on 26th after a long illness.
I began intermittent fasting, only eating between 11:00 and 21:00, as part of a Zoe trial. I’ve changed the timing slightly, but I’m still following the principle two years later.
There was a Roman Army historical display in the old amphitheatre on 2nd October, it was great fun to watch the events going on and look at the Roman equipment. They fired a melon from a ballista and it sailed right out of the arena. Seeing a crowd at the amphitheatre gave me a sense of scale and made the place look much larger. The crowd in the photo is using about a third of the seating space.
On Mondays I enjoyed meeting my friend Stephen for a walk, a coffee, and a chat.
I spent some time working out the route of the old canal through the built-up parts of Cirencester, it was an interesting exercise, poring over old maps.
We were also helping Donna’s Mum and Dad quite a lot, I get on well with Tony; we’ve always enjoyed chatting and he seems to trust me. He was mostly wheelchair-bound at this time as his Parkinson’s progressed, but on a good day he could still do quite a lot for himself.
On 19th I joined the People’s Vote march in London, quite an experience!
My friends Jim and Pam ran a church Mums and Tots group (Puddles) in St Neots. Jim ask me to take a set of photos of each mum with their child for official use by the group, here’s a more general shot that I included for them.
I was meeting frequently with different people, there was the Open Door small group once a week, coffee shop meetings with some friends in town, meetings with my friends Jim, Sean and Kevin rotating around our three homes. It was all good and seemed useful, but three such different groups!
Donna’s Mum and Dad came to stay for a weekend in the middle of the month and we drove over to Olney for a walk and then to Stoke Bruerne to look at the canal and the ladder of locks. There were some great autumn colours on the day. The photo shows Isobel, Tony and Donna on a bridge.
At the end of the month we visited Cirencester to visit my Mum and Dad, and while we were there we popped over to Westonbirt Arboretum to look at the autumn colours. There’s always a wonderful display there, and the trees were more or less at their best.
These are the web development servers in the open plan office where I worked as part of the Web Team. Today these would all be virtual servers hosted at a data centre elsewhere in the company. It was very useful to have multiple copies of each website, one for the developers to work on, another for testing purposes, and a third for the live service.
Things seemed to go from bad to worse with Judy’s colon cancer. In October (I think) she began the first of three courses of chemotherapy (5-fluorouracil) to shrink the metastases and slow them down. This was expected to give her at least a couple of extra years of healthy life. But after starting the first course she became quite unwell and the doctors discovered that she lacked an enzyme that normally enables the body to dispose of the drug. She had to spend some weeks in hospital, quite dangerously ill for some of them.
I had been working in Long Ashton’s Electron Microscopy Lab, helping to manage the instruments and operating the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) for staff unable to do the work themselves. But with a further reshuffle at work I’d been moved to the Computing Section and was now working on MS-DOS and developing the environment that became the LARS System.
The Good News Crusade came to Portishead and a number of us from Yatton and Claverham were involved. There were several days of the Crusade itself, and then we (and others) arranged some post-Crusade meetings as well.
Mum and Dad had a late touring holiday along the Devon and Cornwall coast. Dad took several 35 mm transparency films of that holiday.
We were living in our flat at 20 Belmont Road, and I already had a Scottish Widows life assurance policy as a first step towards securing a mortgage. We were still not well-placed despite having quite a lot of available reserves in our joint bank savings account.
I was back in Bath University and the fourth year was underway with the final exams looming after Easter. Judy’s position was similar, back at Aber (Aberystwyth) for her third and final year. She took the photo from a ground floor window in Alexandra Hall on the Aber seafront as the sun was setting.
The autumn term meant the start of my time in the Lower Sixth at Cirencester Grammar School. During half-term a friend and I dug a hole in the Lower Garden just east of the footpath behind Churnside (37 Victoria Road). We found some Roman stonework, small pieces of burnt clay, pieces of a broken amphora rim, and a small piece of Samian ware with a failed repair, also a piece of tegula (roof tile). We had no idea this was a bad thing to do!
I was in my first term at Cirencester Grammar School. Amongst other subjects I had to learn some Latin, it wasn’t my favourite subject at the time. The image shows a Latin exercise in which I managed to get seven correct answers out of nine. I think my favourite subjects were maths, geography and chemistry.
World events:Luna 3 returned the first images of the far side of the Moon; and Astérix the Gaul first appeared in a French comic.
Cindy turned three and I was in my second year at Querns School; we were living on the Beeches Estate in Cirencester. 17 Queen Anne’s Road was a three-bedroom semi so I had my own room. Mum and Dad’s room had a special feature, a wall-mounted electric fire with two switches. I never saw this heater in use, but there was also a two bar plug-in electric fire that was used downstairs on very cold days in the winter.
I was 1¼-years-old, and life went on well enough as far as I’m aware. We were living in my grandparents house in Victoria Road, Cirencester and Dad was busy working on the nurseries, part of the old family business founded in 1795.
As October passed and Mum and Dad spent more time together, they became what today we would call ‘an item’. His brother Bob, an army officer and 15 years older than Dad, was married to Betty from the town of Dungannon 13 miles south of Coagh. Dad visited them from time to time, but spent much of his off-duty time with Lilias and her family.
World events: The first German Me 262 jet fighter was shot down; and Warsaw was destroyed by the occupying German forces.
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
I don’t know the age of this house, but it is clearly a timber-framed structure and some of those main timbers have adjusted comprehensively to the action of gravity over several centuries.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
Here’s Cirencester’s wonkiest house – well, one of them. Until the 18th century, many buildings would have been constructed of timber, and we all know that timber is prone to warp even after seasoning, and it also responds to pressure and stress by slowly changing its shape.
Modern engineered wooden products generally avoid these issues. For example, plywood is in layers with the grain running in different directions from layer to layer. A thin sheet of wood is weak along the line of the grain, in that direction it will split easily when bent. But it will resist bending and splitting if rotated 90°. So multiple sheets glued together can be strong in all directions.
A timber-framed house
I don’t know the age of this house in Dollar Street, but it is clearly a timber-framed structure and some of those main timbers have adjusted comprehensively to the action of gravity over several centuries. Look at the glazing in the windows, for example, compare the windows with their fellows, side-by-side and up and down. See what I mean? At some point a layer of render was added to hide and protect the timbers so these are no longer visible.
The building is unoccupied at present, but I imagine it’s safe enough. Imagine how the new owners in due course will struggle to make right-angled furniture fit into walls and floors at odd angles
What about us?
Are we sometimes a little bit like this house? Do the pressures of life, sustained over years, even decades, cause us to be a little distorted? Is it difficult for other people with their right-angled opinions and requirements to fit into our expectations given our out-of-true alignments? Is the truth about us sometimes plastered over and hidden from view?
Or might it be the other way around? Am I, are you, straight and true and the fault lies with everyone else?
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
Here’s a second photo from inside Cirencester’s Parish Church. This time we’re looking up for a view of the nave’s wooden ceiling with it’s interesting construction and wooden boarding that supports the external lead sheets to provide the necessary weather-proofing. The structure is certainly a cut above the average house roof!
If you look to the left of the top of the leftmost stone pillar, you will notice a grotesque figure. An imaginary, stone creature with wings stares down at you as it helps to support the stone ceiling below the tower, this space under the tower forms the West Porch of the building.
You can also see some of the north-facing nave windows just below the wooden ceiling, and sunlit stonework from beams shining through the south-facing nave windows (out of sight in this view).
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.
I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.
Click to enlarge
This is an interior view of Cirencester’s Parish Church of John Baptist. The long view you see here is the nave with the chancel at the far end (beyond the screen); the chancel is the oldest part of the building, perhaps dating to about 100 years after the Norman invasion; it’s in this area that the Saxon church stood. Alterations and additions were built at various times from the late 12th century through to the mid 16th century, the tower being added at the beginning of the 15th.
The church overlies parts of the Roman city of Corinium, possibly concealing some ‘missing features’. The city would have baths and a theatre as both were important features in Roman times. No trace of either has been found by the archaeologists.
Because the church is so large (one of the largest in England), it’s sometimes called ‘The Cathedral of the Cotswolds’. Nonetheless, it’s just a local parish church.
Cirencester
For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!
Journeys of Heart and Mind 
