This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1877 Excerpt: ... DURSLEY. The picturesque little town of Dursley nestles down in a Cotswold bottom which forms the end of a valley that opens out northward on to the vale of Gloucester, fifteen milessouth of that City, just where the Severn begins to broaden into an estuary, with the Forest of Dean on its further bank, and beyond that the border hills across the Wye. All around the town the hummocky Cotswolds have been tumbled up in quaint mounds that look too large to be the work of prehistoric Titans, and too small to be the work of geological epochs; while the town itself seems to lie at the bottom of a creek whose waters were drained off into the Severn a few thousand years ago. On the southern shore of this creek the slopes are clothed with lovely hanging woods of beech, while northward they are chiefly pasture lands, dotted here and there on their sides with cottages and "break-neck" farms, bearing clumps of trees on their summits, and marked by the enduring footsteps of the Roman Legions. The town has a railway all to itself, one of the shortest lines in England, yet effectually connecting it with the life and vigpur and bustle of the busy world; for it starts off, two and a half miles away, from the Gloucester and Bristol branch of the Midland line which runs through the Vale, and creeping along the bottom runs till it can run no further because of the ten or twelve miles of high land that lie between its terminus and the vale of Malmesbury. Some generations ago this branch railway would have turned Dursley into a busy manufacturing town after the modern pattern; for there was a time when it was famous for its cloth and blankets, and when other towns came to it for woolcards wherewith to turn tangled wool into fibres fit for the spinners and weavers. But the manufac...
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- PublisherAlan Sutton
- Publication date1975
- ISBN 10 0904387046
- ISBN 13 9780904387049
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages243