Stanway - Beckbury Monument - Stanway
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This walk was originally created by John Stewart, it is my pleasure to update it for him.
Beckbury Monument.This strange monument about which seemingly nothing is known is alongside the Cotswold Way long distance footpath. The monument stands in Cromwell's Clump where he is said to have stood and watched Hailes Abbey being dissolved. Is it possible that the monument is a stone chair commemorating this event?
Beckbury Camp, an Iron Age hill fort ½ a mile along the escarpment, dates long before Doomsday having being occupied 1-2000 BC. Situated on a great vantage point, the inhabitants had a 270 degree view over the Vale to the Welsh Mountains 70 miles away. Today the ‘Strip Lynches’ or terraces created by hundreds of years of ploughing with Oxen, can easily be identified. Standing on a projecting point of the Cotswold Hills, above Hayles Wood, in the hamlet of Farmcote, two and a half miles north-east of Winchcomb. It is defended by a considerable entrenchment, somewhat irregular in form, resting on the steep escarpment of the hill at each end. The bank is nearly 300 yards in length, and the area defended about 4 acres. It commands a most extensive prospect over the surrounding countryside, and from it can be seen no less than twelve other fortified positions. There is a spring of water outside the entrenchments, at the north-west angle, and apparently there was a covered approach leading down to it.
The name Wood Stanway was in use by the 13th century, suggesting that a settlement had been formed by then.
The village, lying in a sheltered position at the foot of the high ground in the south part of the parish and with two small streams running through it, may have been established because the size of the estate made it difficult for the whole to be farmed from one centre. The village is built about a quarter of a mile off the road from Church Stanway to Didbrook with no road running through it, and the houses are built around a number of short streets leading off from a small triangular piece of grass at the west end of the village. Two large farmhouses had been built by the 17th century and Glebe Farm was built later at the east edge of the village. The former vicarage and another large house of similar design were built in the 18th century. Cottages were perhaps pulled down in the 18th and19th centuries and most of the smaller houses in the village were built in the 19th century. One large house was built in the mid-20th century.
England - South West England - Gloucestershire - Cotswolds
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