Afterword: Rural sunrise

Summary

… we soon arrived within the limits of Gloucestershire, in the Eastern parts swelled up into hills called Cotswold, which feed innumerable flocks of sheep, the wool whereof is much praised for its fineness; the middle parts consist of a fertile plain, watered by the Severn: and the Western part, where lies the Forest of Dean, is much covered with woods…

Travelling over this delightsome region, the first place of any remark we came to was Cirencester alias Ciceter.… ‘Tis now beautified with a very handsome church, having a high spired steeple (sic.) and hath once a week a market, and has been enriched with the trade of clothing, though that with other privileges and immunities they enjoyed, are now impaired and gone to decay.

The theme of this Afterword is the emergence of a new epoch in the town's (and nation's) history. It had a distinctive mythology, enshrined in its twilight years by the great country writer Richard Jefferies, in a chapter of Hodge and His Masters entitled ‘Fleeceborough – A Despot’ (written c.1870). The accompanying illustration, ‘Cirencester the Seat of Allen Bathurst Esq.’, engraved by the much-travelled Dutch craftsman, Johannes Kip, captures an in-between phase. It was published as one of a fine series of gentry power houses in Sir Robert Atkyns' Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire (1712). Kip represented Cirencester from the perspective of a hill east of the town where no such hill exists. It is the town as Gulliver might have viewed it striding along one of the old roads from the East.