Training in Cirencester, November 1999

Thursday 25 November 1999. For the moment I had done what I could for the I.T. network at Myerscough College and it was time to start to look at the Management Information System.

At Preston we had Femis software provided by EMIS, the company, with the data store running on Oracle. EMIS had been bought out, merged or otherwise acquired by Capita with the intention that all colleges using Femis would eventually move to their Dolphin software which, at Myerscough, used SQL*Server as a data store. SQL*Server still used the same SQL (Structured Query Language) as Oracle and also MS Access which I could use as a front end for running reports once I got my head around the Dolphin structure diagram. This latter looked a bit similar to the star charts used by the Millenium Falcon...

So this night I found myself staying at a tiny B&B in Cirencester where Capita had a training base. They didn't do evening meals so after the course finished on day one of two, I went into town to see what was available.

Well the Romans hadn't left much... By the time I got out of the course it was starting to go dark but there was just time for a quick look around the town. The first thing to catch the eye was the age of the buildings.

Cirencester has Roman roots and had an abbey built by the Normans and demolished by Henry VIII. The locals were not too sorry to see it go by all accounts as the Abbot dealt out severe punishments for petty crimes. In the Abbey Grounds a small section of the Roman Town Wall is preserved.

And elsewhere yet again - at the opposite end of the Abbey Grounds was the Norman arch that was the gateway to the Abbey. The Gatehouse was a small and picturesque 12th century building with heavy studded wooden doors. It is seen here from inside the grounds. Inside the arch were plaques on the passage walls.

One told us: The 12th century gate house, the only surviving building of the great Augustinian abbey of St. Mary, was one of the entrances to the precincts of the monastery until its dissolution in 1539. Purchased from Queen Elizabeth I By Dr. Richard Master, physician to the queen, the abbey site remained in the ownership of his descendants until 1954 when the gate house was presented to Cirencester in memory of the late Col. W.A. Chester Master by his family.

As it got darker, so I got hungrier. It would seem that nowhere opened until 6:30. The most likely looking place was The King's Head Hotel which had a few meals on the menu that sounded alright. I walked back to the B&B for a while and got some work done on the College's Intranet pages. I ventured out again at 7:00pm.

By now it had gone dark a bit more and I took another shot of the church, which is floodlit from the centre of the town square. The town had more or less gone to sleep and few people were about.

The receptionist of the King's Head told me that the restaurant was a carvery and I was looking forward to a meal as I walked through the ancient courtyard of the inn to the seperate building at the back. What's this? Only one other couple eating and in the bar, just two old men and a dog. And even the dog was asleep...

One of the men called out as I approached the empty bar: "She's gone to change a barrel - help yourself and get me a pint while you're at it!" It turned out to be a carvery with no roast... I had to make do with a chicken kiev, which although nice, was a bit of a let-down!

When I came out of the inn the night was black and still... (still what?) still black! If the town had gone to sleep before it was definitely snoring now! Even the teenagers were walking about in subdued groups. You might also notice that it was pouring with rain...

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Long Weekend In The Cotswolds, 5-7 June 2017

An account of a somewhat dampish Bed and Breakfast weekend in the Cotswolds, UK. History, lovely scenery, abbeys and tea rooms with a spot of gentle humour.

Click the photos for each article.

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A Cotswolds Day

Tuesday 6 June 2017. It was once again raining as we breakfasted at the Smallbrook Cottage B&B. We were on our own today as the American guests had left to travel somewhere else on their tour.

We decided we would start at Bourton-on-the-Water, a gorgeously beautiful place with a very wide main street incorporating a green and the River Windrush which has several low humpbacked bridges crossing it. As it was raining we thought we'd start the day by having a look round the Motor Museum which can be found at one end of the main street.

We last went round it (or first went round it, which is also true) in 1998 and then it was half motor museum and half countryside museum. There is far more motoring content now and whilst some items from the countryside museum are still to be found they tend to be on the back seats of cars or displayed inside vintage caravans etc. The number of actual cars has probably doubled or trebled at a guess and I even found an example of my old beloved 1960s Ford Zephyr Mk.III which I had when I was 17.

This picnic set was on the back seat of an old car and I immediately recognised it as being the same as my grandparents had. It brought back memories of sunny afternoons up on the moors between Lancashire and Yorkshire, stopping in their old Wolseley in a lay-by and eating sandwiches that had been wrapped in waxed paper and placed in the oblong tins. Drinks were warmish tea from a Thermos flask or warmish orange cordial - Quosh - that had been diluted into an old pop bottle and got warm from being in the car. The cups and plates were Melamine, an early plastic.

We came out to a dull but dryer Bourton-on-the-Water, though it occasionally burst into showers, some of them heavy. To escape one of these we ducked into a large antiques shop which had a cafe near the back. The coffee was good, but there was that tinge of musty smell that you often get from antique shops - ancient dust and old cardboard boxes starting to disintegrate from the acid in the card or paper. I had a look in the large toy shop and wondered how young fathers ever managed to pay the asking price of a decent model railway layout, and trains these days? Fran bought a jigsaw pack with four jigsaws in it, two of Venice and two of Paris. No fault of the shop of course, but she later found that both of the Paris ones had missing pieces and had to write to the manufacturers who after checking proof of purchase apologised and sent replacement bags of the full jigsaws.

The rain was falling again and we motored down through Northleach to Cirencester. Known as the Capital of the Cotswolds, the main street is dominated by the massive three-storey porch of the parish church of St John the Baptist. It looked as though it had been recently cleaned too.

Cirencester was Corinium in roman times. There are still traces of the amphitheatre and nearby at Chedworth is the villa of a very important roman. We'll be going there in a bit.

There was an abbey here but in Henry VIII's Dissolution it was destroyed utterly apart from one Norman arch that stands alone in a corner of the Abbey Grounds. A dispute between the abbey and the townsfolk went to the very highest courts. Despite a Royal Charter from 1133 speaking of Burgesses (a freeman of a borough), the manor was granted to the abbey in 1189. The townsfolk protested immediately leading to them being amerced (fined in the modern sense - an amercement was a fixed sum imposed, whilst at the time the word fine meant that the person guilty of some sort of offence would offer an amount of his own choice). Four times in the 13th century the decision went to the abbey and against the town and in 1342 the town claimed that the Abbott had bribed burgesses in the town to surrender the Royal Charter, upon which it had been burned. The Abbott denied this and the case passed up to the King's Bench who demanded to see the foundation charter of the abbey which would have decided the case. Presumably for the townsfolk as the Abbott refused to present it, but offered to pay a fine of £300 in return for a new Royal Charter and this gave him victory at that time.

There was a bit of a ding-dong in February 1643 when Royalists and Parliamentarians had a set-to in the streets of Cirencester. 300 people were killed, but on this day, all was quiet. We went into a small cafe for some lunch and they did a home-made spiced celeriac soup. By heck, it was good, but I was tasting it for the rest of the afternoon!

Cirencester brought back memories of training courses I had been on in 1999-2001 when the firm that supplied my college's information system software was based in Cirencester. I am still in touch with a couple of people from the firm.

Driving back towards Broadway and once again in the rain we passed a sign for Chedworth roman villa, but then thought why not? and as we passed another sign I turned off. We were now driving down very narrow single track country roads with occasional passing places. At least once I had to run my nearside wheels high up a bank at the side of the road to let another oncoming vehicle pass where the passing place was not wide enough. By the time we got close to the villa we were following a coach which carried a party of Spanish schoolchildren. Car parking at the attraction was at the side of the road with cars parked diagonally into spaces. The coach was within a hand's span of them and travelling very slowly indeed!

I made sure I was tucked well into the space I found and we got out very smartish, not wanting to be behind the queue that was bound to form when the coach emptied. We paid at the desk, opted to wander about on our own and passed through into the remains of the villa. The modern building seen above is the site's museum and holds a number of artefacts.

Whilst the villa overlooks the River Coln, its water came from a convenient fresh water spring in the north west of the site and a small shrine to the water nymphs had been created here. Imagine this pool with higher walls around it, painted with a frieze of the small goddesses of the spring. The stonework seen here though is original roman and in situ.

There are bathing and plunge pools to see and some mosaics. Unfortunately rain started to fall again and we reluctantly gave up, and committed ourselves to the single-track roads again.

We stopped in Northleach to visit the mechanical music museum. We were surprised when we entered. Expecting a shop counter and a few souvenirs, we instead found ourselves in a pub! Result! There was a large party already in the museum and an hour's wait to endure. It would have seemed churlish not to sit and have a drink...

Cotswolds Holiday Index

Ship Shape and Bristol Fashion

Tuesday 28 May 1998. In the previous entry Fran and I visited the S.S. Great Britain in Bristol Docks. The well-known saying that is the title of this entry was stamped onto the ship's bell.

In its ship-building days, Bristol had a reputation second to none and that led to the saying becoming part of Britain's folklore. Along with such gems as "Red sky at morning - shepherd's warning" which meant that if the clouds were low enough to be tinged red by the rising sun it was likely to rain. Its sister saying is "Red sky at night - shepherd's lass is a bit o' alright!" or something like that...

Anyway this has nothing to do with our entry here except to pad it out as, although I took plenty of photos, I don't have plenty of tales to tell!

The Great Britain is a fair bit away from the city centre so we took a ferry through the old docks. Bristol has a history not only of ship-building but as a port, where not all the goods are to the city's credit. Slavers used Bristol with over 2000 slave ships setting out in the 110 years from 1697 to 1807.

It was an important wine port also. England's best known sherry, Harveys Bristol Cream, is so called because the Harvey family were based in Bristol.

We came to the city centre and immediately noted the sky. "Dark sky in afternoon - makes it hard to play the bassoon".

There being no such thing as mobile Internet in 1998 we went in search of a Tourist Information Office to find some accomodation for the night. The place was absolutely full. So was Cheddar, Wells, Weston... We spent two hours in the Tourist Information Office and didn't have any luck until we said we were going to head towards the Cotswolds and was there anything up that way?

We eventually secured a room in a guest house in Cirencester - the place we started this holiday with a brief stop at the Roman arena! It was an hour's run so we set off back towards the car which was parked near the Great Britain. The sky wasn't quite so threatening now. "Sky turning fair - don't put Domestos on your hair" so we walked back down the docks instead of taking the ferry. Well ok - the ferry was nowhere in bloody sight actually, but the walk was ok.

This wasn't a ferry, but a pleasure cruise around the docks where they tell you things like the dockside Post Office had to have the cellars excavated and when they did, the skeletons of scores of people were found. Must have been hellish working for the Post Office in those days...

Now I remember that story because I had been to Bristol for a conference a few weeks previously and they had taken delegates on such a trip and it's the only story I remember! Oh the days of hospitality...!

As we neared the car we came across this little fellow, quite unperturbed that his home was bobbing up and down as the wind got up and the sky was definitely going dark again! "Daytime street lighting - tomcats start fighting!"

Look, alright, I'm making these up as I go along, ok? I have visions of folks in other countries going, "Here! Look at what they say in England!" I could start a national trend in Mozambique or somewhere where folk gather and intone solemnly "Daytime street lighting..."

So we head north to Cirencester where we find our guest house is managed by a very friendly Chinese couple. We walked into the town centre to eat in a pub and found just one customer with a dog and a pint and no-one behind the bar.

"If you serve yerself, can yer pour me a pint?" said the customer, nodding sagely whilst the dog stared at me with a look that clearly said "When the sun's done shinin' on that hillock - take no notice, he's a pillock..."

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Down on the Farm

We've only ever once had the experience of staying on a farm as part of a holiday. It was a bit of a weird holiday in that we zig-zagged all around the southern half of England, but we started out in Malmesbury, staying at the afore-mentioned farmhouse.

But if we are going to suddenly veer off during the rest of the week, we may as well start now and have a look at the remains of the Roman arena in Cirencester.

Gladiators used to fight in the arena here. On 25 May 1998 it appears to be the local teenagers doing the tumbling... Death is slower, but what a way to go... Those 17 year olds will be almost 30 now - I hope you are ashamed!!!

This is our base for a few days, Wychurch Farm in Malmesbury. Why we've never stayed in a farmhouse since is beyond me - I really enjoyed the experience.

Wychurch was kitted out with antique furniture and little displays of all sorts - hats, canes and a pile of parts from a clockwork Hornby railway set that made me want to sneak out of the bedroom at 3:00am and build a layout... Though the chamber pots on the bedroom window sill were in serious danger of being used as the rooms of course were not en-suite!

And just look at me, 1998 version! 32-inch waist and fit as a butcher's dog! Darn that sluggish thyroid! I still have that 6-pack. It's just that you can't see it anymore...

The good lady of the house had told us of a nearby river walk where kingfishers had been seen. We went out for a pre-breakfast walk - this is only about 7:15am. What???? Gasp...

I can't say we actually saw a kingfisher, but we did glimpse a vivid blue flash passing the field of vision from right to left. Sheesh, they are hard to spot on the move!

Ok, we've arrived. A few of the places we will visit during this week have already been covered on this blog but the photos are different and I'll attempt to say different things even if I have to make them up! They will be so compelling and realistic you won't be able to spot them amongst the truth. Apart from maybe the bit about the aliens...

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