Stow-on-the-Wold

Don't you just love those Cotswolds place-names! Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-the-Marsh, and of course, Bourton-on-the-Water. All aligned in a straight line along the A429 or, as the Romans knew it, the Fosse Way.

Any of these three villages is well worth a visit. We have been on numerous occasions, sometimes making a very slight detour to Upper and Lower Slaughter - a name so evocative of evil doings, but such a delightful place to visit.

This is the second of my postcard views tonight and this one from the late 1950s or early 1960s is one of my favourites as it shows a model of the very first car I owned and drove - a MkIV Reliant Regal.

Unfortunately half hidden in shadow, photographs of these 3-wheeled cars are hard to come across. The one I had was a van and whilst this one is the same shape exactly, the model shown has had windows fitted - an expensive luxury as this made the car liable at the time for Purchase Tax whereas the van had solid (I use the term loosely!) fibreglass sides.

It was in fact the first fibreglass Reliant. Previous models had been aluminium - that metal whose name is such a challenge for our friends across the Atlantic!

The Reliant van had been made in 1959 and was 11 years old by the time I made its acquaintance. The engine, a 700cc sidevalve - which meant that the spark plugs pointed up vertically out of the top of the engine - was completely knackered and friends soon got used to it breaking down and me changing the spark plugs and cleaning the oil and deposits off the old set for use in another 20 miles...

This is the beast itself! One white headlight and one yellow one. In the 1960s many drivers preferred yellow headlights because they shone through smog better than white light, which just lit up the fog and soot and made it look like you had a wall around you.

I passed my driving test in this vehicle, although I had to take another to be able to drive a 4-wheeled car when I was 17. The only reason for having such an embarrassing car was that it was legal to drive at 16!

There's more about the car and its successors on my Nostalgia web site.