Читать книгу The Cotswold Way. NATIONAL TRAIL Two-way trail guide - Chipping Campden to Bath онлайн

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The Civil War and the enclosures

In the 17th century the Civil War was fought here, as elsewhere, forcing a temporary halt in the fortunes that were being made. Along the escarpment several battle sites are passed on the Cotswold Way, among them a hilltop area still known today as the Battlefields, where the Battle of Lansdown was fought on 5 July 1643. At the other end of the walk, Campden House, next to Chipping Campden’s parish church, was taken as a garrison for Royalist troops, but when they left in 1645 they destroyed it by fire. Painswick’s church still bears signs of a Civil War skirmish, and one of the last of the battles was fought on the slopes of Dover’s Hill.

Between 1700 and 1840 large areas of open land were enclosed by Acts of Parliament, which brought about the countryside’s greatest change in appearance for hundreds of years. This was when drystone walls and hedges began to divide the wolds into the criss-cross grid patterns we see today. Large estates were planted with shelter belts for the raising of game birds, while the Cotswolds as a whole became much less dependent on sheep and turned instead to a broader agricultural base with arable land replacing the sheep-walks of old.