Chocolate-box village with 99 yew trees in the churchyard
SOME of the yew trees in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Painswick are shaped like field mushrooms, others are plump and rounded like freshly baked bloomers.
There are cones and orbs, upright box-shapes and dumpy bap-like trees, but most importantly, there are 99.
Most of the cleverly clipped trees were saplings in 1800.
And according to local lore it’s impossible to round their number up to 100.
Every time one is planted, another dies, so the churchyard remains, like a nervous batsman, forever one short of its century.
Yew trees are commonly found in churchyards.
There’s a pleasing avenue to guide the congregation of St Paul’s, Shurdington to Sunday services, for example.
Some say yews are favoured because they are evergreen and live to a ripe old age, thus symbolising immortality.
There may also be truth in the view that English long bows were made of yew, so growing them provided the parson with a handy cash crop.
In September, the annual Clipping ceremony takes place in Painswick, as it has done for centuries.
It’s nothing to do with pruning the trees, but derives from a Saxon word “clyppan”, meaning to embrace.
At the ceremony, villagers gather in the churchyard, hold hands and form a
circle round the church while singing hymns.
Despite the traffic that perpetually trundles along is main street, Painswick is as pretty as the lid of a chocolate box.
Most of its buildings are of the limestone that has for centuries been quarried on Painswick Beacon, so the town sits comfortably on the ground from which it comes.
Years past, Painswick was a market centre for smaller villages along the valley.
And it had its country characters, as Laurie Lee, who grew up in nearby Slad, wrote in his memoir of charabanc times Cider With Rosie.
“Percy-from-painswick was a clown and a ragged dandy, who used to come over the hill, dressed in frock-coat and leggings, looking for local girls,” he wrote.
“Harmless, half-witted, he wooed only with is tongue. He had a sharp pink face and a dancer’s light body and the girls used to follow him everywhere, teasing him into cheekier fancies and pinning ribbons to his swallow-tail coat.”
Whether Percy was ever cheeky enough to end up in the village stocks we don’t know, but the device that was used to belittle wrongdoers can be seen to this day near Painswick’s old Court House to the south side of the churchyard wall.
Cast in iron, probably by a local blacksmith, the stocks are like no others that survive in England.
In shape they look like John Lennon’s glasses, through which the miscreant’s feet were put and padlocked.
In 1905 the world opened up to the isolated villagers when a motor bus service from Stroud to Painswick was started by the Great Western Railway.
Prior to the public opening, local dignitaries were invited on a trial run aboard the Milnes Daimler bus, a splendid 22 seater with a 20 hp engine.
Arriving in Painswick, the party took lunch in the Falcon in preparation for the adventure back.
A contributor to Gloucestershire Within Living Memory, published by the Federation of Women’s Institutes in 1996, recalls the bus.
“The GWR ran a single decker service between Painswick and Stroud. It had two long seats facing each other with a narrow gangway. Sammy Adams was the driver.
“The conductor stood on the platform at the back and rang information to the driver - one ring meant stop, two rings start and three to say there was a vehicle behind wanting to overtake.
“By the driver were seats for two with the notice ‘These seats are reserved for smokers - ladies using them will be charged 3d extra.’
The bus service perhaps helped overcome the rivalry and mistrust that traditionally existed between the people of Painswick and their neighbours in Stroud.
Folk from Stroud, so it was said, would never take refreshment in Painswick, because they believed the villagers ate bow-wow pie - made of stray dogs.
The notion of Painswick people tucking into cooked collie is unlikely to be literally true, but it could well be a reference to the fact that poverty was rife in rural communities in days gone by and many people were no doubt glad to eat whatever could be found.
Painswick’s rural tranquillity suffered a cruel blow during the Second World War when, in the early morning of June 12, 1941, bombs rained down on the village.
Poultry Court (then lived in by a Mr Lewis), a house in Friday Street and another in Tibbiwell Lane all received direct hits.
Four homes were destroyed in the raid, seven suffered serious damage and a further 35 had windows blown in, or tiles blown off the roof.
Electricity and telephone lines were
severed.
Ten people were injured in the bombings and two children were killed, both of them - with sad irony - were evacuees who’d been billeted in Painswick for their own safety.
Just outside Painswick is the tiny hamlet of Paradise where until about 40 years ago there was a pub called appropriately - the Adam and Eve. (The building is still there).
This country hostelry was typical of its kind, as anyone who once popped in will remember.
Its theme was no frills. Bare floorboards. Trestles for a bar. A choice of beer from the barrel on the trestles, or locally-made scrumpy from out the back (the latter as clear, sharp and dangerous as honed steel).
But in winter there was always a fine log fire in the hearth and every Friday evening there was a sing-song.
Always singing the loudest, in a warbling vibrato, was a woman who played the two tunes in her repertoire quite well.
They were Lay Down Your Arms And Surrender To Me (Ann Shelton) and Have I The Right (The Honeycombs).