Marcher Land Adventures 5

For this final stage in the journey we stretch the definition of 'Marches' a bit to include the land well into Gloucestershire! But as I made my way home from Rose Cottage I called in at Welsh Newton parish church, to which the term still definitely applies. It has an original stone rood screen dating from about 1320, a most unusual feature for a little village church, and also the grave of St John Kemble, one of the Roman Catholic Forty Martyrs of England & Wales: although he was found to have nothing to do with the Titus Oates conspiracy (not hard to have no connection with something which hadn't happened) he was executed anyway. This is all mentioned in the church. What they don't mention is another grave within a yard or two of St John's which I spotted from a distance. Is that the Jake Thackray, Yorkshire songster and humourist, I thought? He died in Monmouth, and it is. 

I'd visited Gloucester Cathedral, but many years ago, so it was time to return. St Catherine appears in glass twice, once in a medieval treatment, once in a Victorian.

Gloucester's museums carried on the pattern of not being open. The City Museum was - a nice ground floor of palaeontology and archaeology accompanied by medieval music, which becomes a rather fragmented and bitty account of later times on the upper storey - but the Folk Museum, which is the social-history branch, appears to have erratic opening times at the moment and the staff at the City Museum couldn't even confirm when they were despite being part of the same setup.

Two wells to finish with. Nobody seems quite sure how the Crocodile Spring at Compton Abdale came to be, though Historic England says a local builder, 'George Curtis of Hazleton', made it in the mid-1800s. Its crocodile-snout spout was a bit obscured when I saw it, but it was flowing very merrily indeed. I met a woman washing in the water. A little further on is a very important site to the history of well-reverence in the British Isles, the Roman Villa at Chedworth. The octagonal spring-fed pool in its Nymphaeum seems, from nearby finds, to have been converted to Christian use at some point, and then converted back again. Recent excavations have uncovered mosaics that appear to have been laid down in the villa as late as the mid-400s, which rather changes our view of sub-Roman Britain. Unfortunately when the Victorian excavators originally dug the place up they not only stuck a little shooting lodge right in the middle of it, but also preserved the Roman walls with twee little tiled roofs that don't help when you're trying to envisage what the two-storey buildings would have looked like. 

That got me back home, but I still had a week of holiday to go so there are more travels to come!