South West England's Best Views by Simon Jenkins

Author:Simon Jenkins
Language: spa
Format: epub
Tags: England’s 100 Best Views: South West
ISBN: 9781847659484
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2013-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

CASTLE COMBE

The Street

The English village ranks with Big Ben and the white cliffs of Dover as an emblem of English picturesque. Nowhere better embodies it than Castle Combe. It has the reassurance of soft sun on limestone walls, the gentle curve of gabled cottages, a humpback bridge and a market cross. Petunias and begonias deck creamy houses against a backdrop of oak-clad hills. It is the England of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

Strip back the sentiment and this remains a place of visual delight. Castle Combe’s main street stretches just two hundred metres, but in every direction the townscape offers lessons in informality, intimacy, proportion and surprise. An hour spent sitting on its market cross is worth a dozen lectures on modern architecture.

The village is set above a stream in a well-watered fold of the Wiltshire hills. The castle stands at a distance and the manor, now a hotel, is hidden in its park behind the church. There is one street, running from a bridge over the Bybrook stream up to the cross. Off the square is the church, its graveyard filled with clothiers’ chest tombs. The population is just 350.

Almost everything about these limestone villages is attributable to the wool boom of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Compared with most of Europe, peace reigned and England supplied the troubled markets abroad with wool cloth. The Cotswolds were rich in sheep. Wealth flowed down the streams to where villagers carded, spun, wove and dyed the wool. Castle Combe produced a popular red and white chequered cloth and claims to have invented the blanket.

This was a community as wealthy as any in the country. Its church was rebuilt with tall perpendicular naves. The lord of the manor was Sir John Fastolf, who financed a troop at Agincourt and was one of many ‘Falstaffs’ credited as Shakespeare’s original. He would have presided over its ceremonies and patronised its civic institutions.

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