Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
its neighbour. It is still worth making a diversion to the top - an obvious path climbs
to it from the saddle between the two peaks.
Cross the lane half-right ahead onto a streamside path which takes you
behind some houses and into a meadow. Keep ahead along the left-hand
edge, enter a second meadow and maintain direction, soon losing the
stream which curves leftward. The path now rises slightly through the
meadow to its opposite boundary fence where you turn left. After about
100 metres go through a gate on the right and walk along the top bound-
ary of another meadow. Following a fence, keep on to the far corner where
you enter a very small meadow. Veer slightly left to a gateway, then con-
tinue through parkland (the way is not very clear) towards its far bottom
corner where a kissing gate gives onto a drive. Turn right and follow this
down to Long Street in
Dursley
, which you gain beside a building known
as the Priory. Walk up Long Street to reach the covered Market House in
the town centre (grid ref: 757982). Dursley has a range of accommoda-
tion, refreshments, shops, a post office, and so on.
DURSLEY
Once one of the principal wool and cloth towns of the Cotswolds, with the decline
in woollen manufacture Dursley made a successful transition to modern engineering.
Transition seems to be in the blood of the town, for Roger Berkeley, cousin to Edward
the Confessor, held the manor of Dursley and had built himself a castle (long since
disappeared) by the time the Normans landed, but rather than be replaced by a fa-
vourite of the invaders, he managed to retain his position. Eventually manorial ties
were severed and the new masters were those whose power came from wool. Now, as
elsewhere along the Cotswolds, the dependence on sheep is but a memory. However,
the town survives in its own right, although the price for survival has been the substi-
tution of a number of old buildings by others of less architectural merit. Nonetheless,
the Market House (built 1738) remains a model of a past era. It has a bell turret, and
a niche with a statue of Queen Anne which faces the church.
