Category: Cotswolds

Helping a charity with lights

At Vale Road in Stratton on the northern edge of the Cotswold town of Cirencester, residents (and one in particular) put a lot of effort each year into decorating their homes and gardens with all sorts of coloured and illuminated decorations. And they invite the people who come to look to make a contribution to Macmillan Cancer Support.

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Image of the day – 181

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Click images to enlarge

People love Christmas lights and decorations, and people hate illness particularly if there’s no cure. So can Christmas lights help people with incurable illness? Yes they can! But…how?

Well, one way is to use the Christmas decorations to raise money for charity, and that’s what one street in Cirencester has been doing every year for some time now.

There’s more inside – a model village!

At Vale Road in Stratton on the northern edge of the Cotswold town of Cirencester, residents (and one in particular) put a lot of effort each year into decorating their homes and gardens with all sorts of coloured and illuminated decorations. And they invite the people who come to look to make a contribution to Macmillan Cancer Support. This charity provides care, help, nursing and support for cancer patients and their families right at the time when they need help most. They will help families care for a mum, a dad, or a grandparent at home.

The heart of the action

If you live in Cirencester or the local area, why not drive out to Vale Road and park in a nearby street like Vaisey Road, Tinglesfield or Park View? (But please don’t block any driveways or park near junctions.) Then walk the short distance to Vale Road. You can pay for a tour of the best of the lights, delight your children (or grandchildren), and help support a great cause all at the same time. What could be better than that?

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Fallen tree
Season’s Greetings 2025

Crystalline inclusions in Cotswold stone

It seems that quartz geodes are not unusual in Oolitic limestone deposits.

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Image of the day – 171

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Click to enlarge

There’s a long stretch of dry stone Cotswold wall along the western edge of the Gloucester Road between Cirencester and Stratton. Walking along the footpath one day I was surprised to see the crystalline inclusions featured in this photo. The crystals look to me like a form of quartz (six-sided columns with six-faced prisms at both ends).

This might be part of a geode fractured open while quarrying the stone. There’s a small chance that the other side of the geode exists elsewhere in the same wall or in some other structure built around the same time. It seems that quartz geodes are not unusual in Oolitic limestone deposits. When they are stained purple purple the crystals are known as amethyst. The formation in the photo shows no hint of colour at all. The deposit must have formed from a particularly pure solution of quartz.

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A canal walk through Chalford
Lichens
A Cotswold scene

A grand old house in Cirencester

Mullings engaged the architect William Jay to design the house, and Watermoor House was accordingly built around 1827 in the Greek Revival style

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Image of the day – 170

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Click to enlarge

The land now occupied by Watermoor House and St Michael’s Park may once have been common land. But early large scale Ordnance Survey maps mark a much larger area, including that now occupied by the house and park, as a large nursery. It might have been owned at one time by Richard Gregory who was a Cirencester nurseryman in the 1790s.

The business (and probably the land) passed into the hands of John Jefferies at least by the early 1800s, and it seems that Randolph Mullings, a local solicitor, bought a substantial piece of it in order to build a large house in its own grounds. The details remain unknown, but Gregory, Jefferies and Mullings were known to one another, and Jefferies worked as a manager for Gregory on the nurseries. Gregory lost much of his money by providing surety for a friend’s loan, and Mullings advised Jefferies to continue managing the business and wait to see how things would work out.

Having acquired part of the land, Mullings engaged the architect William Jay to design the building; Watermoor House was constructed to Jay’s plan around 1827 in the Greek Revival style; and the garden and park were added to complete the property. The house is now grade II listed.

At some point Watermoor House became a private school until it closed in the 1950s or 60s. It may have had some other function following this, but today it is a residential care home.

I’ve cobbled this tale together from limited sources that may or may not be reliable. There are also many gaps. It would be good if the story could be properly researched by someone with the time and skills to undertake it.

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Resources for Cirencester history

What do we see here?

The water flows in the town are complex, this section is often known as Gumstool Brook, but it might also be regarded as a diverted part of the Churn.

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Image of the day – 169

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Click to enlarge

At the top of the image you can see the rears of buildings on Cecily Hill in Cirencester. Their gardens contain the trunks and foliage of mature trees just beyond the wall. The wall separates those gardens from the water channel and may have been built specifically for that purpose. Some of the tree branches have grown across the top of the wall.

Near the base of the wall is a distinct line, brown below and much paler above. I think the brown part of the wall is often underwater. The water flow is strongly seasonal, high in wintertime and much, much lower in the summer. The River Churn divides at the Gloucester Road bridge, only a kilometre from this point. The major branch follows the outside of the Roman city wall and usually continues to flow all year round. But the branch in the photo is fed from the outflow of the long, narrow, supply pound for Barton Mill and this in turn is fed from the main flow of the River Churn. The water flows in the town are complex, this section is often known as Gumstool Brook, but it might also be regarded as a diverted part of the Churn.

The pipework at the bottom of this wall was there in the 1950s and 60s when I was a child. Most of it was hidden then by a low wall topped with flagstones, but today much of the structure has fallen away exposing the glazed pipes. Out of the photo a little further to the left, the water disappears underground, running south of Coxwell Street and reappearing at the surface further west in the Abbey Grounds.

It’s good to know that the Town Council and the Friends of Gumstool Brook are looking into ways of improving the flow of this watercourse by adjusting the sluice management rules. We might see the water flowing properly all summer in 2026.

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Image of the day – 72
Churn flood plain
Churn flooding

Mist arising

The faded warm colour of the sky, the stark blackness of the skeletal trees, and rising mist make a scene I just had to capture. I had only my phone with me, but for wide-field, distant views that’s good enough.

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Image of the day – 141

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.

Click to enlarge

This photo was taken from the Gloucester Road, between Cirencester and the village of Stratton a mile to the north. It was the 15th of January 2025, at nearly five in the evening. The sun had already set so the air was cooling after a mild day with good sunshine and the moist air above the grass in the fields was condensing as mist.

The faded warm colour of the sky, the stark blackness of the skeletal trees, and rising mist make a scene I just had to capture. I had only my phone with me, but for wide-field, distant views that’s good enough. There’s a hint of mystery here too, we can only guess what might be hidden in the most misty areas.

And I couldn’t help thinking about the parallels with people. Before birth we are hidden, like the darkness before the dawn (you need to imagine a country dawn, not a city dawn, no streetlights, no artificial light). After birth we are visible to all and we change, growing in size, growing in knowledge, growing too in wisdom – hopefully. Most of our life is lived in the full light of day. We have a job, we raise a family, we interact with others as friends, or family, or perhaps sometimes even as enemies.

Lives, like days, begin, run their course, and then become evening. In the evening of life, the pace slows, there are memories that may be well-defined, or sometimes, like the mist, our memories hide things from us. The light fades, and when we die we enter darkness like the night.

Or do we? People have discussed what happens after death, every generation that has lived has wondered about this. Some people are certain that the darkness of death is the end of all sensation. And they are right, of course. But might there be other possibilities? Every generation has also held untestable ideas. Is there a God? If so, what is he/she like? Answers to untestable questions are not wrong, they are just not capable of being tested.

It has always seemed quite sensible to me to live my life as if what I do matters during the night of my life as well as during its day. But also, the teaching of Jesus is very logically sound, not testable but also, as far as I can see, internally coherent and free of self contradiction. That quality amazes me, I believe his claims to be true, testable or not. He has convinced me. Maybe he has convinced you too, or maybe not. We have that freedom, and we cannot persuade one another using the scientific approach, good as that is for studying more measurable and therefore testable matters.

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