Winchcombe is a Noah's Ark of old-fashioned friendly shops. The Town is a total
break from the spreading, bar-coded, double glazed nothingness of the modern
suburb. There are enough ancient Inns to service a small city and enough cosy
tea-rooms to drain the plantations of Sri Lanka.
 On a sharp frosty morning, the
entry into Winchcombe catches your breath. It is always beautiful.
A perfect, glowing, silvery-gold town of mellow tightly packed
Cotswold cottages hemmed by incomparable hills. Seen from the fields,
Winchcombe is a romantic muddle of cascading gables, mansard roofs,
mullion windows, regency loggias and stone towers.
The church tower of St. Peter stands pre-eminent
in a spotlight kindly provided by the sun itself. A co-operative
sun may throw an additional beam on Sudeley Castle. Pure gold wrapped
in leaves. Winchcombe histories blithely speak of a Saxon foundation
but every garden spade comes up with fragments of a Roman past
and shards of pottery that stretch from Constantine to Lily Langtry.
Winchcombe is a pragmatic
little place. Proud
of its beauty, but not vain.Winchcombe would hang its washing from
a ley-line and show a druid where to park his car. It has no time
for mumbo-jumbo.
Before the Reformation a great bulk of an Abbey
stood at the centre of the Town claiming Royal Offa as its founder.
The Abbey still seems to linger, invisible and utterly destroyed,
behind a massive wall in Abbey Terrace.
Winchcombe is probably one of the last remaining
historic towns in England not marred by an endless periphery of
modern dross. No industrial parks and no dreary inter-weaved by-passes
separate Winchcombe from its Cotswold landscape. It has the same
magic as a mediaeval Tuscan town.
(The
Prince Rudolphus Von Furstenberg, for GlosCounty, 1999) |
