How local people went about their nineto-five Nostalgia
IF your grandparents have lived in Churchdown for many a long year, ask them if they remember Ye Old Elm pub.
It stood in front of what is now the Bat and Bull until the Second World War.
At that time, a plan was mooted to reroute the main Cheltenham to Gloucester Road through Churchdown past the Old Elm.
Flowers Brewery, believing that a pub in the contemporary roadhouse style would attract plenty of passing custom, demolished the old and built the new. Villagers were sorry to see the old pub go and no doubt the directors of Flowers Brewery were miffed when the A40 stayed were it was.
Today, there are two pubs in the village – the Bat and Bull and the Hare and Hounds – but there used to be more.
The Olde House at Home was an ale and cider house in Brookfield Road, where the 17th century building still stands complete with its cider press.
No trace remains of a pub called the Rising Sun, or of a hostelry near Sugar Loaf Bridge that was called the Sugar Loaf.
Churchdown Hill is an ancient place, as the derivation of the name reveals.
‘Church’ came from the Celtic word crouco, meaning ‘hill’. ‘Down’ came from the Saxon word ‘dun’, meaning hill. And later generations added the suffix ‘hill’. So Churchdown Hill actually means ‘Hill Hill Hill’.
On top are the remains of an Iron Age fort, one of 78 known in Gloucestershire, proving that human habitation of the spot harks back at least 2,500 years. In Roman times, a noble family lived in a Villa on the Noke side.
And St Bartholomew’s church, which perches on the highest point of the hill, rests on an ancient, probably Bronze Age mound.
Until a century or so ago, the parish embraced Churchdown and Hucclecote villages, and the church provided a place of worship for both communities.
There’s an old joke that whenever the rector declared ‘Oh Lord bless our chosen people’ (Chosen being an alternative name for Churchdown) members of the congregation from Hucclecote called out, ‘And what about us?’
During the Second World War, the tower of St Bartholomew’s saw service as a signal station for the Home Guard. Messages were sent from this vantage point to units at Rotol and the Gloster Aircraft Company at first by Aldis lamp, then by field telephone and eventually wireless.
In June 1940, an over-enthusiastic member of the Home Guard rang the church bell, which caused panic in the locality as people took this as the sign of a Nazi invasion. An inquiry revealed that the bell-toller had misheard the radio message that Jersey had been invaded and believed Dursley in Gloucestershire had been overrun by German paratroopers.
Churchdown Hill, or Chosen Hill as it’s been called by locals since ancient days, rises from the flat plain because a cap of hard marly rock has slowed the erosive efforts of wind and water. The marly, by the way, was quarried into the present century for roadstone, and during the First World War German prisoners provided the labour.
Although the hill has a hard hat, slippery clay lies beneath the surface. So over the aeons, seeping water has coaxed lumps of the hill to declare independence and landslide their way down its slopes.
These tumps once had individual names, such as Devil’s Oak Tump, Low Knoll, Kissing Tump and Tinker’s Hill, although these arcane titles have now almost fallen from use.
Springs flow from the hill. On the west side is Muzzle Well, where a steady trickle dribbles into a stone trough, as it has since pagan days.
Mystical powers were once attributed to the well, and it was said that a maiden could stare deeply into the waters and see the reflection of her future husband.
Churchdown Hill became a favoured destination for picnickers when the village railway station opened in 1874.
A few years later, the number of visitors swelled as the new craze of bicycling caught on, followed in the 1930s by more day trippers when cars such as the Austin Seven brought motoring within reach of many.
Half a dozen tea gardens catered for the tourists, including Fishlock’s, which served refreshments at the top of the hill and ferried its supplies up and down in the panniers of a donkey.
There was even a golf course on the hill, nine holes and two miles long, which boasted over 200 members in 1906, but closed during the First World War.
Climbing the steep slope up to St Bartholomew’s in all weathers can’t have been much of a joke for anyone and begs the question why the church was built in such an inconvenient position. Nobody knows for sure, but there are various theories.
The church was constructed in the late 12th century from locally quarried stone and may have been commissioned by Archbishop Roger of York, who was implicated in the murder of Thomas Becket.
Perhaps Roger chose a difficult site on purpose as a sort of penance.
Another theory is that the church was a station for pilgrims on their way to St Oswald’s shrine in Gloucester. Or, according to local lore, that the devil carried the church to the top of the hill to inflict pain and punishment on those who went to worship there.
The real reason probably has something to do with that Bronze age mound mentioned earlier. Churchdown Hill was of religious significance in pagan times, so St Bart’s was put where it is to show, literally, that Christianity now dominated over the old ways.