Charles G. Harper

CIRENCESTER—SOURCE OF THE THAMES—KEMBLE—ASHTON KEYNES—CRICKLADE—ST. AUGUSTINE’S WELL

The head-spring of the Thames is, in summer, not so easy a place to find. It rises on the borders of Wilts and Gloucestershire, and has been marked down and written about sufficiently often; but the exact spot is quested for with difficulty, and when the traveller has found it, he is, after all, not sure of his find, for the place is supplied, in these latter days, with no recognisable landmark, and even the road-men and the infrequent wayfarers along that ancient way, the Akeman Street, which runs close by, appear uncertain. That it is “over there, somewhere,” is the most exact information the enquirer is likely, at a venture, to obtain.

There are excellent reasons for this distressing incertitude. The winter reason is that Trewsbury Mead, the great flat meadow in which Thames Head is situated, is so water-logged that it is often a morass, and not infrequently a lake. In summer, on the other hand, the spot is so parched, partly on account of the season, but much more by reason of the pumping-works in the immediate neighbourhood, that not only the Thames Head spring is quite dry, but the bed of the infant Thames itself is generally dry for the first two miles of its course.

Thames Head is situated three miles south-west of Cirencester, that beautiful old stone-built town whose name we are traditionally told to pronounce “Ciceter,” just as Shakespeare wrote it. That was the old popular way, before the folks of the surrounding country could read or write, and knew no better; but to-day, when “education” is the birthright of all, though culture be the acquisition of few, they are the rustic-folk—the “lower orders”—who say “Cirencester,” as my lords and gentlemen and ladies were wont to do; while nowadays the upper circles refer to “Ciceter.” It is a curious reversal. If you say, in these times, “Cirencester,” you, in so doing, proclaim yourself, socially, an outsider, fit only to feed out of the same trough as those creatures who pronounce “Marjoribanks,” “Cholmondeley,” or “Wemyss” as spelled. We all know—or ought—that “Marshbanks,” “Chumley,” and “Weems” are your only ways, if you would be socially saved. These are the last resorts of those who have no other distinction to mark them out from the common herd: just a verbal inflection, combined, possibly, with a method of hand-shaking. To what straits we are reduced, in these democratic times, to express our superiority!

There is another way to the pronunciation of “Cirencester,” lately come into favour with provincials of this neighbourhood. It is a method of the simplest: merely the adoption of the clipped way common to the local milestones, which tell the tale of so many miles to “Ciren.”

The noblest thing in Cirencester is the beautiful old church, which rises in its midst, beside the remarkably broad High Street, with much of that scale and stateliness we commonly associate with a cathedral. It is one of the noblest works of the Perpendicular period, when architects grew aspiring, but did not always succeed in building artistically as well as big. Here the two aims have been achieved. But a third desideratum, that of building securely, was not originally included, it would appear, for one of the most astonishing things about this structure is the great masonry strut which would be called a “shore” if it were only in timber, and is so clearly for utility, and absolutely unbeautiful and unarchitectural, that to style it a buttress would be to disparage the exquisite adornments that buttresses at their best are capable of being. This great crutch for a noble tower in danger of falling so soon as it was built, nearly five hundred years ago, is, however, justified of its existence, for the lofty belfry yet stands securely. The ingenious way in which the supporting masonry is built diagonally through the west wall of the south aisle, down to the ground, compels admiration for the engineering skill displayed.

The great three-storeyed porch, by far the largest porch, and certainly the most singular, in England, built in advance of the south aisle, and looking proudly upon the street, would seem to have been built for the convenience of the many priests who served the large number of chantries established from time to time in the church. It is a very late and very beautiful Perpendicular work. Not long after its completion the greasy rascals were sent packing, in the life-giving Reformation that saved the nation. It for long afterwards served as the Town Hall, but was commonly known as “the Vice”—a strange survival and corruption of “parvise.”

The interior of the church discloses a nave-arcade of very lofty and graceful proportions; a work probably as completely satisfactory as anything in this country. And there is very much else to study here. There are monuments, worn and battered, to knights and dames, wine-merchants, wool-merchants, grocers, and other old tradesmen of the town. Among them may be noticed the brass to Reginald Spycer, 1442, with his four wives—Reginald in the middle, and the four ladies beside him, two and two. A late example is that of Philip Marner, 1587, representing him full-length, robed, with staff in one hand and a flower in the other. A dog sits beside him. In the upper left-hand is a pair of shears, indicating that he was a clothier. The rhymed inscription says:—

In a glazed frame is preserved an ancient blue velvet pulpit-cloth, given in 1478 by Ralph Parsons, a priest, whose cope it had been.

The road that runs, white and broad, in a straight undeviating line, from Cirencester to Thames Head, and so on at last, after many miles, to Bath—the “Akemanceaster” that has given the Akeman Street its name—comes in three miles to a stone bridge spanning a canal. This is “Thames Head Bridge,” and the canal is the Thames and Severn Canal, which, beginning at Inglesham, just above Lechlade, ends at Stroud. The length of this water-way is thirty miles. The works were begun in 1783 and completed in 1789.

The object of the Thames and Severn Canal, which joins the Stroudwater Canal, and reaches the Severn at Framilode, was to provide a commercial water-way between the highest point of the navigable Thames, near Lechlade, and the Bristol Channel. Its course lies along some very high ground just beyond Thames Head, going westward, and in all there are forty-four locks, rising 241 ft. 3 in. There is also a remarkable piece of engineering in the Sapperton Tunnel, through which the canal takes its course. The tunnel is fifteen feet wide, and is driven through Sapperton Hill at a point 250 feet beneath its summit.

It follows that of necessity a canal, so elevated above the surrounding country, must be provided with water by artificial means, and a supply is provided by a pumping-station close at hand to Thames Head Bridge. This raises water to the extent of three million gallons a day: hence the dried-up character of the Thames Head spring, except in winter, and the usual summer phenomenon of the infant Thames being quite innocent of water for a distance of two miles from its source. Of late years the Great Western Railway, which has a station at Kemble, a mile and a half away, has erected a still larger and more powerful pumping-station, for the purpose of supplying water for its own needs at Swindon, fourteen miles distant.

The Akeman Street here divides Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. If we descend from the Thames Head Canal bridge and follow the towing-path in a westerly direction, into Gloucestershire, for half a mile, we come, by scrambling down the canal-bank to the meadow below, to the source of the river, and at the same time to the destruction of a cherished illusion. Picturesque old histories of the Thames have made us familiar with Thames Head, and have shown us dainty vignettes of that spring. One such I have before me as I write these words. It shows a rustic well, overhung by graceful trees, with a little country-girl in homely pinafore dipping a foot in the water as it gushes forth. We need expect no such scene nowadays. The well is buried under fallen masses of the dull, ochre-coloured earth of Trewsbury Mead, and all we see is a rough, dry hollow, overhung by trees which refuse to live up to the grace suggested by the old illustrations. We need not wonder any more why so few people know Thames Head, or why the spot is unmarked. It is merely a memory, and Peacock’s charming verse has long ceased to be applicable:—

But although the pumping-stations so greedily suck up all the available moisture in summer, the spring is said often to burst out in winter, three feet high; and at such times it is only necessary to drive a walking-stick anywhere into the turf of this meadow for a little fount to spring up from the hole thus drilled.

The river thus originated is known alternatively as the “Isis,” and in the writings of old pedantic antiquaries retains that alternative name until Oxford is passed and Dorchester reached; where, according to such authorities, in the confluence of the Isis and the Thame, the “Thame-Isis,” becomes the “Tamesis,” or Thames. To the Oxford boating-man, however, the streams below and above Oxford are respectively the Lower and the Upper River, and “Isis” is reserved for the title of a University magazine, or the name of a boating-club.

“Isis” is, of course, a Latinised form of “Ouse,” which in its turn is a modified form of the Celtic “uisc,” for water, and gives us such other river-names as Usk, Axe, Exe, and Wye; while we find it hidden again in the names of Kirkby Wiske, in Yorkshire, and in that of “whisky,” deriving from “usquebaugh.”

The time when the Upper Thames was first called “Isis” is uncertain. The name is certainly a Latinised form of “Ouse”; but the Romans do not appear to have so styled it. Julius CÆsar, in his Commentaries, speaks only of “Tamesis”; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 905, mentions only the “Thames.” We do not, in fact, read of anything like “Isis” until 1359, when a monk of Chester, Ranulphus Higden, wrote in his Polychronicon a passage which, rendered into English from his Latin original, runs thus: “Tamisa seems to be composed from the names of two rivers, the Ysa, or Usa, and the Thama. The Thama, running by Dorchester, falls into the Ysa; thence the whole river, from its source to the eastern sea, is called Thamisa.” A much later writer, Leland, I think, says, in that rarefied, detached way we expect in old writers, “The common people call it the ‘Thames,’ but scholars call it the ‘Isis.’”

The name of “Thames” is equally Celtic with that of the Latinised “Isis,” nor is it the only Thames in the country, for the river Tamar, dividing Devon and Cornwall; the Teme, in Shropshire and Herefordshire; and the Tame, in Staffordshire, are each closely allied in name.

The generally-accepted source of the Thames at Thames Head has by no means gone undisputed, and a rival exists at Seven Springs, three miles south-east of Cheltenham. This spot is the source of the river Churn, which, falling into the Thames at Cricklade, after a course of sixteen or seventeen miles, takes the stream some ten miles farther up-country than that which issues from Thames Head. Thus we have the singular paradox, that the Churn, this first tributary of the Thames, is considerably longer than the parent stream. This is a problem that would have desolated the logical mind of Euclid, and it has worried geographers and writers of books for uncounted years. No matter how diligently we may seek to track this heresy to its lair—to its original propagation—we shall inevitably be foiled; nor indeed (as in the case of rival religious dogmas) shall we ever be able to definitely settle which of the two is the heresy, and which the true faith. If we rely upon the canon that the source of any river is that point which is situated farthest from its mouth, and then refer to the maps, there can be no doubt whatever that the Churn is the true Thames, and that the Seven Springs source is its head-spring. It is an unavoidable conclusion, like it or like it not; and if we take the trouble to visit Seven Springs, we shall discover that some one has been concerned to mark the spot prominently with the same belief, in the inscription set up there on a wall going down into the pool:—

or, in English,

We can only assume, in the difficulty with which we are thus faced, that the original error, of placing Thames Head at Trewsbury Mead, and naming the stream which issues from Seven Springs the “Churn,” arose in those very remote times, before even the Romans came to Britain, when surveying and map-making were unknown and relative distances were uncertain. That the river Churn bore its present name even at the period when the Romans descended upon Britain is an assured thing, for the Romans named Corinium—the present “Cirencester”—from its situation on the Churn. The existing form of the place-name is of Saxon origin, and is really “Churnchester”—the “castle on the Churn.”

Kemble Junction, the railway station that dominates this neighbourhood, marks where the little four-mile branch of the Great Western Railway goes off to Cirencester from the line to Stroud and Gloucester. There is no likely expectation that Cirencester will begin to grow and to lose its old-world character while it remains, as now, at the loose end of this little single-track branch railway; and the hunting-men of this Vale of White Horse district remain quite unconcerned and unafraid of developments. This country, between Cirencester, Cricklade and Lechlade, is a hunting country and an agricultural country, and long centuries ago it lost to Leeds and Bradford, and other like centres, the clothing industry for which this Cotswold district was in mediÆval times and after famed. Thus Kemble Junction is by no means a junction of the Swindon or the Clapham Junction type, and is rather a peaceful than a bustling place. The village itself stands on rising ground above this district of springs. Even though it be more remarkable for its stone walls than for anything else, it is a not unpleasing village, for in a neighbourhood such as this, where laminated stone is easily dug out from a few feet below the level of the soil, we expect dry stone walling and stone-built houses; and certainly the hard stony effect is softened by the plentiful trees of the place. The Early English church, with tall spire, 120 feet high, has been so thoroughly “restored,” and swept and garnished, and so plentifully endued with plaster, that architects with a love of antiquity, and all antiquaries, looking upon it, can scarce refrain from tears. Inside the church is a curious monument—

We shall probably not be wrong in regarding this as one of the ultra-Puritan families of that Puritan age.

Just below Kemble, on the way to the hamlet of Ewen, the course of the Thames is in summer hardly to be distinguished in the meadows through which it runs. Grass covers it, in common with the meadows themselves; only the grass is of a ranker and coarser kind, and largely admixed with docks. The dry-walling of one of these meadows shows the winter direction of the stream clearly enough, in the row of holes left in building the wall for the water to pass through.

Ewen, standing by the roadside, is remarkable only for its rustic cottages, but they are particularly beautiful in their old unstudied way; heavily thatched, and surrounded with old-fashioned gardens. The Thames begins to flow, or to trickle, regularly at Upper Somerford Mill, whose water-wheel, immense in proportion to the little stream, is picturesquely sheltered under wide-spreading trees. The village of Somerford Keynes lies close at hand.

The way between this village and Ashton Keynes passes over rough common-land, and enters Ashton Keynes romantically, past the great church, and along a fine avenue of elms beside the manor-house, emerging at what, until a few years ago, was Ashton Keynes Mill. The elm avenue of Ashton Keynes is other than we should expect, if we come to the place primed with a knowledge of what the “Keynes” in the place-name signifies. Those elms should be oaks, for “Keynes” derives from the ancient Norman word for an oak-tree; in later French, “chÊnaie.” Hence also the name of Horsted Keynes, in Sussex.

All the old mills that once made the Thames additionally picturesque are disappearing. Some go up in flame and smoke, like Iffley Mill, below Oxford, painted and sketched by a thousand artists, and described by a hundred writers of books and descriptive articles, to whose lasting sorrow it was destroyed by fire in 1907. Shiplake Mill met a similar fate a little earlier, and modern milling conditions forbid their ever being rebuilt. Ashton Keynes Mill became disestablished, as a mill, because it could no longer compete with the modern steam-roller flour-mills, that nowadays grind flour much more expeditiously and cheaply than the old water-driven mills. But the old mill-house stands, little altered. It is built substantially, of stone, and has old peaked gables and casemented windows, and so, when its ancient commercial career came at last to an end, its own picturesqueness, and its strikingly beautiful setting, appealed irresistibly to some appreciative person seeking an old English home; with the result that it has been converted into a very charming private residence.

Little need be said about Ashton Keynes church, for it is of very late Gothic, and plentifully uninteresting; but the village itself is a delight. It is the queen of Upper Thames villages, with a picture at every turn. Here the Thames flows quietly down one side of the village street, and at the beginning of that rural, cottage-bordered, tree-shaded highway is the first bridge across the river; an ancient Gothic bridge, with a slipway beside it, where the horses are brought down to wash their legs in summer. Beside the bridge stand the remains of one of the three fifteenth-century wayside crosses which once gave Ashton Keynes a peculiarly sanctified look. The ruins of all three are still here,—smashed originally during the seventeenth-century troubles in which King, Church, Parliament and Puritans contended violently together; and further damaged by the mischievous pranks of many generations of village children.

There are many little bridges spanning the Thames at Ashton Keynes, for the stream washes the old stone garden-walls of a long line of cottages, and the entrance to each cottage necessitates a bridge of stone, of brick, or of timber. Stonecrop, candytuft, wallflowers, arabis, snapdragon, and many other semi-wild plants grow in the crevices of these old walls, and drape them all the summer with an unimaginable mantle of beauty; and where the cottages end, and the highway becomes a straight flat road, making for Cricklade, a modern country residence has been built, with the walls of it going down in the same way into the water, and the wild flowers encouraged in the like fashion to inhabit there. A contemplative person might pass a pleasant time at Ashton Keynes, where there is a homely inn, but none of those unamusing “amusements” which serve to render places of holiday resort unendurable. For those not very numerous persons who are satisfied with their own company Ashton Keynes affords decided attractions. No one ever goes there, for it is on the road to Nowhere in Particular, and not even the motor-car is a very familiar sight. Thus the ruminative stranger will have his privacy respected; unless indeed he happens to be either an artist or a photographer, when he is certain to be surrounded by a dense crowd of children, who seem to become instinctively aware of an open sketch-book or a camera at hand, and surround the owners of them in most embarrassing fashion. The artist is the more fortunate of the two, for it is only an easily-satisfied curiosity to see what he is doing which attracts these unwelcome attentions; while the unfortunate photographer is pestered with requests to be “took,” and worried to extremity of despair by hordes of fleeting children obscuring his camera’s field of vision, or posing grotesquely and in most damaging fashion in his choicest foregrounds.

Below Ashton Keynes the Thames is joined by the little Swillbrook, and crossed at the confluence by the small, three-arched masonry Oaklade Bridge. A mile or so below this is Water Hay Bridge, a typical “county” bridge, whose frame of iron girders and railings, painted white, ill assorts with the luxuriance of swaying reeds and thickly-clustered alders that here enshrouds the stream.

We read in old accounts of the Thames that it was navigable for barges as far as this point, and “Water Hay” may possibly be a corruption of Water Hythe, indicating a wharf. It is in this connection to be noted that the Cricklade and Ashton Keynes road crosses here, and that however unlikely it may now seem that the stream could ever have been navigable to this spot for such heavy craft as barges, it must always be borne in mind that, in the many general causes that have led to the shrinkage of rivers throughout the country, and here in especial in the pumping away of the head-spring of the Thames, the stream cannot now closely compare with its old self of a hundred and fifty years ago. We may therefore very well believe those old writers who speak of the Thames being navigable to this point, and imagine, readily enough, a rude wharf where goods were landed, and left for Ashton Keynes and surrounding villages, in days when even the few roads of the present time either did not exist at all, or were so bad that haulage along them was almost impossible, by reason either of the mud, or of the water that very often flooded them.

Between this and the little town of Cricklade the stream winds continually, but the road goes straight over Water Hay Bridge and makes direct for the townlet, three miles distant. The navigation of these first few miles of the Thames was long ago considered to be so irretrievably a thing of the past, that it was permitted the constructors of the North Wilts Canal, in crossing the stream, one mile above Cricklade, to build a brick bridge or aqueduct so low-pitched across it that the crown of the arch scarcely appears above water, and effectually stops any attempt to get even a canoe through.

The approach to Cricklade from the west by road is a noble introduction to the town. It is a small town, of entirely agricultural character, yet it has been a place of importance in its day; and although that day has long passed, its two churches of St. Sampson and St. Mary prove it to have been once considerable. Cricklade, indeed, standing on the Ermine Way, the Roman road that led from Spinae to Corinium—or in modern terms, from Speen by Newbury to Cirencester—could not have been other than important. The invading Danes, making their way up the Thames Valley in A.D. 905, and again in 1016, found it worth while plundering, and it has from very early times been a market-town. It prospered in a quiet way until the opening of the Thames and Severn Canal, in 1789, for it was, after the ancient wharf at Water Hay had been abandoned, at the head of the Thames navigation; but when the canal came past, outside the northern end of the town, the water-borne traffic halted here no more, and Cricklade was, in a minor-tragical way, ruined. Nor have railways served ever to redress the injustice. The Great Western comes no nearer than the small wayside station of Purton, four miles distant, and although the Midland and South-Western Junction Railway comes to Cricklade, and has a station here, the railway management—judging from the fact of its providing only one train a day each way, at inconvenient hours—would much rather you did not use it, you know, if you don’t mind. And the Cricklade people do not use it, and go the four miles to Purton, instead. We have, therefore, not the slightest prospect of Cricklade ever growing. It is quite in keeping with the rural look of the one long broad street of Cricklade, bordered by houses that are, for the most part, of cottage-like appearance, that it has for centuries been known as the “Peasant Borough”: the technical territorial “township” including no fewer than fifty-one surrounding parishes. That it should have been, until the passing of an early Reform Act, also a Parliamentary borough, returning members to Parliament, does not of itself seem remarkable, knowing as we do that places like Gatton and Old Sarum, with no inhabitants at all, shared the same privilege. Cricklade, however, lost its representation through long-continued and shameless bribery.

Here, in the long silent streets of Cricklade, the stranger is noted curiously in summer, the local season being in winter; for this is now a hunting-centre of the divided Vale of White Horse country, and the hounds are kennelled here.

Cricklade, we are told, is properly “cerriglÁd”: an ancient British expression signifying a “stony ford”; but is it not, even more properly, “Cerrig-let,” i.e. the stony place where the river Churn has its outlet to the Thames? We have several places in England in which “cerrig” is hidden under various corruptions: notably Crick, in Northamptonshire, and numerous places named Creech, in widely-sundered districts; while in Wales we find Cerrig-y-Druidion in the north, and Crickhowell in the south. In Scotland the word is commonly rendered “Craig.”

But old writers who flourished before the science of place-names had come into existence generally guessed at the meaning of the names of those places of which they wrote; and extremely bad guesses they almost always made. Their way with “Cricklade” is a shocking example of a “reach-me-down” ready-made meaning, supplying a barbarous misfit. Cricklade, if you please, is, according to these seekers after truth who are content to pick up the first obvious lie that rests in their path, or to seize the first absurdity that suggests itself, is “Greeklade,” the site of a forgotten Greek university established here even before the coming of the Romans. Forgotten! yes: that university is easily forgotten which had never any existence; but this derivation served its day, and was generally accepted. Thus we find the poet Drayton content to write in his Polyolbion:

But Drayton erred only where others had erred for some seven or eight hundred years; for indeed the absurd legend derives from the name of “Greek-islade,” given to the town in the time of Alfred the Great.

St. Sampson’s, the chief church of Cricklade, stands by the road as you enter from the direction of Ashton Keynes; its tall, curiously-panelled tower framed beautifully in the view by a noble group of hedgerow elms. This odd dedication puzzles most people, and in truth St. Sampson, or “Samson,” without the “p,” is a remote and obscure personage who flourished in the sixth century, and is thought to have died A.D. 560. He appears to have been a Breton who fled his country, and in after-years returned to Brittany and became Bishop of DÔl. Two other churches are dedicated to him: South Hill, by Launceston, and Golant, near Lostwithiel, in Cornwall; while the island of Samson, in the Scilly Isles, owes its name to this source. Milton Abbey, in Dorsetshire, was formerly quadruply dedicated to SS. Mary, Michael, Samson, and Bradwalladr; while there still exists a St. Sampson’s church in the City of York. But that owes its name to another fellow—an early Archbishop of York; so early, indeed, that he is not generally included among the primates. He, strangely enough, appears to have been contemporary with, and a friend of, the other Sampson.

This church of St. Sampson at Cricklade does the saint especial honour, for it is a much more than usually fine cruciform building, greatly superior to the usual parish type. It presents, in general, an exterior view of Perpendicular character, even though, on closer examination, the architectural expert may discover very considerable Early English and Decorated portions. The central tower is its great feature, for you not only see it from afar, but on a closer view it is found to be so strikingly individual that even those persons unusually well-versed in these things are puzzled to find anywhere its fellow. The detailed illustration of it in this book will render unnecessary any lengthy description; and will at the same time reveal the noble quality of its sturdy pinnacles and the exquisitely effective character of the deep panelling that covers the upper stage and mounts into the angle-turrets. It is a finely massive, robust design, to which the elegant light pierced parapet adds a contrasting note of airy grace. In the detailed view of this tower an empty niche will be seen, which probably once held a statue of the eponymous saint of this church. On the side of the tower not shown a keen eye may observe a pair of scissors sculptured at a considerable height from the ground: an indication, doubtless, that the tower, rebuilt in its present form, owed its existence to the benefaction of one of those wealthy clothiers who in the fifteenth century attained in the Cotswold and surrounding districts to their highest degree of prosperity, and gave liberally of their wealth to the rebuilding of churches, the founding of almshouses, and other good deeds, and have left numerous records of their existence in the fine monumental brasses of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, ensigned with their merchants’-marks or the emblems of their trade—the wool-pack and the shears, in place of the heraldic achievements of nobler persons.

The interior of this charming church is even more noble than the impressive exterior bids us expect. It is at once massive, and well-lighted, and graceful: the climax of its beauty found beneath the central tower, where the piers and arches and finely-ribbed vaulting go soaring up to form a handsome lantern, set about with many shields, sculptured with the arms of Edward the Confessor, of the diocese of Salisbury, and of the Dudleys, Earls of Warwick. Prominent here among these cognizances we shall find the intertwined sickles of the extinct, but once wealthy and powerful, Hungerford family, whose ancient badge is found plentifully all over Wiltshire, and frequently in Somerset. It is a Sir Walter Hungerford of the mid-fifteenth century who is here the subject of allusion in this shield, for he gave the presentation of the living of St. Sampson’s, together with the manor of Abington Court, to the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury, for the express purpose of maintaining the Hungerford Chantry in Salisbury Cathedral, and to assist in keeping in repair the Cathedral campanile.

Many changes have befallen since then: the Church has been reformed, and chantries are no longer possible; but the ancient, beautiful, and interesting detached campanile of Salisbury Cathedral was in existence until nearly the close of the eighteenth century, when it was wantonly destroyed by Wyatt in the course of the disastrous “restorations” in which the Dean and Chapter, charged particularly to maintain the campanile, placidly betrayed their trust, and calmly saw it levelled with the ground. To-day the presentation belongs to the Dean and Chapter of Bristol.

A curious feature of the exterior of St. Sampson’s is the flying angle-buttress to the south-east, supporting a Perpendicular south-east chapel built very clumsily on to the already-existing Decorated chancel. The illustration clearly shows the awkward way in which the addition abuts upon the older building, partly blocking up a very fine window. The addition was obviously not built with good foundations, as the necessity for further adding the flying buttress, and the subsidence still evident in the distinctly out-of-plumb lines of the chapel, still show. The date of the buttress is still visible, carved on the stonework: “Anno Domini 1569.”

The tall canopied cross now standing in the churchyard was originally in the street, but was removed hither to preserve it from the injury it was there likely to suffer; and in its stead we find an object of a very different character, and warranted to withstand the ill-usage of many generations of mischievous children: nothing less than a Russian, or other, gun. The school-buildings immediately in the rear of the cross are the successors of those founded and endowed in 1652 by one Robert Jenner, goldsmith, of London.

Another similar cross is to be seen in the little churchyard of the curious old church of St. Mary at the other, the northern, extremity of the town, and immediately looking on to the street. St. Mary’s is altogether different in appearance from the noble, upstanding church of St. Sampson, but none the less interesting on that account. It is a huddled-together old building, with a squat tower, or remains of a tower, and altogether on a miniature scale. Queer little dormer windows start out of its broadly-sloping roofs, and they and the south porch are things of delight in the picturesque way. The interior is an affair of very slender Late Perpendicular nave piers and arcade, contrasting with a stern, sturdy Norman chancel-arch.

Proceeding still northward beyond this point, the Thames is seen, here reinforced by its confluence with the river Churn; and if we care further to proceed a few yards, the Thames and Severn Canal will be found.

A strange belief exists among the people of Cricklade, to the effect that any native of the town possesses, as his or her birthright, the privilege of selling anything without a licence in the streets, not only of Cricklade, but of any other town in England and Wales. This belief, although unsupported by any evidence, has been handed down from time immemorial. It would be curious if any native-born inhabitant of Cricklade were to test this by selling any articles in (say) the streets of London, without first providing himself with a hawker’s licence, so that this traditionary right could be proved still effective, or otherwise. The privilege is said to have been conferred by some unspecified king, in acknowledgment of Cricklade having given shelter to his Queen “when in distress.”

In this connection we may profitably turn to the old farm-house, once a manor-house, in Cricklade, by the banks of the Thames, called “Abington Court,” once the property, as we have already seen, of the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury. This is said to have been formerly a Royal hunting-box, and tradition further tells us that Charles the Second was the last monarch to use it. History does not tell us of any Queen in distress at Cricklade, nor of any Queen ever here; but kings have ever been accustomed to maintain many queens (so, without offence, in these pure pages, to call them) from the time of Solomon and David, throughout the ages, and until modern times. It is a kingly privilege, not often allowed to lapse; and it is quite within the bounds of possibility that there was at some time one of these uncertificated consorts at Abington Court, and that here she gave birth to a child, and that this particular (or shall we say, this not very particular?) king thereupon celebrated the occasion by conferring the curious privilege already discussed.

There is something in this ancient house which seems to support the theory: a substantial something in the shape of a large and elaborately-carved old oaken four-poster bedstead, fine enough to have been used by such distinguished personages. No one knows how it came here, but here it remains, and goes with the property. Tenants may come and go, but the bedstead, left by the last royal occupant, stays.

An exceptionally interesting spot exists at a distance of a mile-and-a-half to the north of Cricklade town, in the neighbourhood of Latton and Down Ampney. You will not easily discover this interesting spot, because no map marks it, no guide-book tells of it, and only very few among the older generation of the rural agricultural labourers cherish any recollection of it. The younger folk know nothing whatever of this historic landmark, which is so insignificant and elusive a thing that one might readily be in the same field with it, and yet not see it. It is the pure and never-failing spring of St. Augustine’s Well, once famed in all the country round about; either by that name, or by the alternative title of the “Lertoll Well,” or stream. This pure and cooling fount was long credited with medicinal virtues, less because of any properties in the water itself than because it was blessed by Saint Augustine. For it was to these parts that Augustine came, somewhere about thirteen hundred and twenty years ago, for his conference with the dignitaries of the native British Church. Augustine, accredited by the Pope, Gregory the Great, to England, on a mission to reconvert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, in addition sought to reconcile the early British Church, which had continued to survive in Wales, with the Church of Rome; and to that end he arranged a conference on or near this spot, beyond the then boundary of Saxon England, in the territory of the British clan known as the Hwiccas. Had Augustine been a different manner of man, the proposals he had to offer for a fusion of the Churches would probably have been entertained; but although long since canonised, he was really very little of a saint, and by no means the eager missioner he is generally represented. He came to England, in the first instance, only because he was sent, very much against his inclination, by his spiritual head, whom he dared not disobey; and his haughty, intolerant temper brought these ideas of unity to naught. At the place of meeting was an oak-tree, for many centuries afterwards known as “St. Augustine’s Oak,” but long since utterly decayed and vanished away. It is said to have been felled about 1825, and the site of it is supposed to be a small group of farm-buildings, rebuilt in modern times, known as the “Oak Barn.” The British clergy had heard unfavourably of Augustine’s domineering spirit, and went with suspicion to meet him. They had agreed, however, when they proceeded to this oak, which must have been a notable landmark, that if he received them standing, they would listen favourably to his proposals; but if he sat when they presented themselves, thus receiving them as inferiors, they would refuse to discuss the question of unity.

Augustine received them sitting, and the conference broke up. He is said to have performed miracles here, at this meeting, and to have touched the eyes of the blind with the water of the Lertoll stream, so that their sight was restored; but none of these prodigies availed with those slighted native clergy.

It is remarkable, however, that an obscure tradition lingers among the peasantry of the neighbourhood to this day, to the effect that the water of this stream is “good for the eyes.” You will not find this tradition in books; it is just a belief handed down from father to son in the course of some forty generations.

The spring is situated in a meadow to the north of the Cricklade and Maisey Hampton road, and bubbles up and runs unheeded away, in these material, sceptical times; but those days are not far removed when the peasantry of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire resorted to it, for cure of their ailments, and filled bottles with the treasured water, for home use.