Winchcombe in the Cotswolds

Doco and I, on our one over-nighter from Oxford, took the train northwest to Moreton-in-Marsh, were met by Cole's second half-cousin Peter Harris and his wife Carol, and driven west up into the Cotswold hills to their home in Winchcolme - with one stop at the 17th-century Stanway great-house and church.  Rolling green fields, stone fences, hedge rows, sheep, and buildings made of warm pale-yellow "oolitic limestone", quarried from a band that crosses the Cotswolds.  After lunch, a drive west down the steep escarpment out of the Cotswolds and into Cheltenham, a spa town on the Severn River plain, to the museum of Arts-and-Crafts furniture (for Cole and Peter).

Stanway church

three "grotesques" in the warm pale-yellow "oolitic" limestone of the Stanway wall

Stanway great-house of Lord Wemyss (pronounced "weems")

Stanway gate-house (plus Peter, Carol and Cole)

Supper in a Winchcolme pub, and an evening pouring over Harris-family photos from Calne (Peter and Cole share their great-grandfather Thomas Harris of "Harris Bacon" - Peter from wife #2, Cole from wife #3).  Carol knows all the Harris-family history, as well as all the Winchcolme-area history - a fascinating guide.  She also had seen, in a Harris exhibit in Calne, a pair of diaries by Thomas and Elizabeth Colebrook (wife #3 and mother of JC Harris of New Denver) that Cole didn't know existed.  To be followed up on!

Winchcolme ("in the corner of the hill"), a sheltered bowl with defensible high land around three sides and a good supply of spring water, was the home of the Saxon kings of Mercia.  Also of a Benedictine Abbey (796 AD) - destroyed in 1540 in "the dissolution of the monasteries".  Not much sign now of either Saxons or Benedictines.  Only the "people's church" next to the abbey site, St. Peter's (1460), remains and is a large part of Carol and Peter's lives.

St Peter's Church gate, designed by Peter (Harris)

Gothic revival teacher's house next to St Peter's churchyard

Alms house, Winchcolme, 16th century, with warning to more-recent dog-walkers:
"It is an offence for a person in charge of a dog to allow it to foul the footway"

Finally, a visit to the "Winchcolme Pottery" (where we did a fair bit of damage) before being delivered back to Moreton-in-Marsh for an Oxford-bound train.  An intense glimpse of English countryside and its history.

abandoned late-19th-century kiln
at Winchcolme Pottery

looking into the active wood-fired kiln, licking flames at 1200 C