Scroll down or click on the jump links below to read a short review of each of our recent 2024-25 talks.
Kate Peake - An Aerial Journey through the Cotswolds
Kate returned to inaugurate our year’s lecture series once more. Now Chair of the Tewkesbury Movie Making Club, Kate has been creating short films with a local focus for almost a decade and in this time, justifiably, has won various awards. Now, as a registered drone pilot, she can take her camera to the skies, and so was able to show our familiar Cotswold landscape from a completely different perspective. In a series of superb short films and accompanying stories about the places en route, Kate took us from Chipping Campden to Painswick, following the Cotswold Way, via Stanway, Stanton, Hailes Abbey, Winchcombe, Belas Knap, Cleve Hill and Painswick Beacon. In taking us over the Air Balloon pub (now demolished) and the associated A417 Missing Link extension she demonstrated yet again the value of her craft in recording local history. Alongside, Angela, Kate’s Mum, provided a display of photographs of the various locations together with some beautiful cards, which were on offer.
Broadway Tower |
Sharon Gardham - The History of Rodborough Common
Having just completed the research for her doctorate on Rodborough Common, Sharon gave us an overview of the outcomes, which will form the main body of her thesis. She began though by reminding us of the aims and objectives of Stroud Valleys Project, for which she is an Officer, responsible for their Garden Guardians project and for leading various guided walks. The most recent of the latter, just a few weeks previously, involved a search of the Common for the last vestiges of medieval Custom Wood. Sharon told us something of that in her talk and much more about the history of the Common and the changes to the environment over the more recent centuries, with a particular focus on the involvement of the locals (even now there are over 200 Commoners with relevant rights).
Sharon traced the evolution of the Common from its geological formation in the Jurassic period, through its rich history in the Anglo Saxon and Medieval periods, to the changes in the landscape evident over the past century.
While after 1066 Rodborough was included in the Manor of Minchinhampton, in reality the area was divided into a number of manorlets, the names of which (eg Spillmans) survive in one form or another today. Much of our appreciation of these times comes from the Minchinhampton Custumal, written around 1300, which listed land holdings, the Commoners and their rights, as well as the local customs. The Common rights included that of pasturage, estover (wood collecting for fuel), pannage (at one time there were 3000 pigs foraging on the Common), and rights in the soil (quarrying etc). Then the Common was a wooded pasture, and there is still evidence of the ancient wood in the wild flowers such as wood anemone and the various bumps and dips in the topography where trees fell.
Eventually harvesting the wood for fuel and allowing sheep to graze, which became the primary use, altered the environment. Sharon displayed a photo-postcard of Rodborough Fort from the 1960s, showing a Common bare of trees. It was a time when the location was very popular for visitors, and records show upwards of 2000 cars parked at weekends.
The recognition of the value of the Common to wildlife resulted in it being gifted to the National Trust in 1937 by the keen naturalist Thomas Bainbrigge Fletcher (President of our Club 1941-42), and it is now a designated Special Area of Conservation. Albeit now with more scrub and trees, seasonal conservation grazing by cattle helps to maintain it. In conclusion, Sharon highlighted the efforts of SVP in helping to survey the Common towards best conservation of the variety of wonderful flora and fauna, such as the pasque flower, the rugged oil beetle and the recently reintroduced large blue butterfly, and skylarks.
On Rodborough Common, looking West |