Hidden GloucestershireKenneth WebbNovember 13, 2025Hidden Gloucestershire by Margaret Sollars (1988), Margaret Sollars Author and Artist, AblingtonComment

Ablington, Gloucestershire by Margaret Sollars

Hidden GloucestershireKenneth WebbNovember 13, 2025Hidden Gloucestershire by Margaret Sollars (1988), Margaret Sollars Author and Artist, AblingtonComment

ABLINGTON

HIDDEN GLOUCESTERSHIRE

by

Margaret Sollars

1988

when Arthur Gibbs came to Ablington Manor more than a century ago he found much of the downland above this Coln Valley village bare and deserted for in the late 1800s, farming was in recession and it was difficult to find tenants for the Upland farms and he rightly believed that it was the privileged sporting fraternity to which he belonged which kept life going in the Cotswolds in those difficult days.

The Elizabethan manor, its high finnialled gables and clustered chimneys appearing from behind a formidable roadside wall, turns its face towards the Cold which runs through its grounds crossed by a little double arched bridge. Here the gorgeous blue flash of a kingfisher can still be seen as he flits along the bank looking for a suitable vantage point from which to spear a fish with that cruel beak. For, though Arthur Gibbs would seem to many modern eyes to be one of those fanatical sportsmen intent on destroying all his rivals, such as heron and kingfisher, even in his day the line was drawn at annihilating the beautiful kingfisher, so exotic in colour that it hardly seems to belong here at all.

But the heron was a different matter for he was, and still is, a menace to the precious trout and, handsome as he is, flapping his way along the stream, curved neck drawn in, feet trailing, he still pays the price. But who can forgive those gun-happy young men who, in one hour one winter day shot ‘a woodcock, a snipe, a wild duck, two pheasants, six rabbits, a pigeon, a heron and several moorhens’ or the farmer whose only reason for shooting a peregrine falcon was ‘if he didn’t, someone else would’?

Now those days are gone and the peregrine, if it appears at all, is more endanger from the attentions of bird watchers than from the gun while the wood-pigeons still invade the stubble fields in spite of the mass slaughter which once took place on Ablington Downs.

And in those days, Ablington, hidden away in the valley of the Coln, was a deal more isolated than it is now when the tourist can swoop through the village hardly noticing it is there, and there was many a villager who had never been as far as Cheltenham some 15 miles away. When, late in the day, the railway made its painful way along the Cotswold Ridge from Cirencester and through nearby Chadworth to Cheltenham and the glittering possibility of a railway journey to the metropolis came a step nearer, the ordinary people shook their heads, preferring to stick to the world they knew and to leave such things to the folk in the manor who could afford such extravagances.

Penned by Margaret Sollars and published in 1988

Pages 9-10 written in 1988