Brimscombe and Heritage
One night in the trenches, Ivor Gurney, the Great War poet, suddenly remembered Brimscombe: ‘One lucky hour in the middle of my tiredness I came under the pines of the sheer steep And saw the stars like steady candles gleam Above and through; Brimscombe wrapped (past life) in sleep!’ This was how Gurney recollected, in his mind’s eye, Brimscombe, with its spring-line cottages, and its mills and terraces spread along the valley floor, alongside the canal and railway and London-road …
And did he recall, I wonder, the station at Brimscombe, gleaming in the darkness, with its stone and slate engine shed (a 20,000-gallon water tank at the front and offices at the back) for the two banking engines that helped trains up the steep incline to the tunnel at Sapperton?
Twenty or so years later, the GWR introduced a new heritage: the famous Cheltenham Flyer powered by the new Castle class steam engines, breaking records as it hurtled west from Paddington. Passengers, perhaps, catching a glance of The Meadow (the home of Brimscombe F.C.), with its bank all covered in celandine, dock, and cowslips and that memory of the handloom weaver and spinner: teazels. An unconscious memory of the trenches, too, with dug-outs signposted Home and Away.
The heritage is different today. Smokeless mill chimneys and forgotten mill ponds; bus shelters with murals of a lost world; light engineering a ribbon along the canal-side, and the former King & Castle (not that the powerful King class steamed along this valley) now the Pavilion. But there, about a hundred miles from Paddington: the social enterprises and shared economy at the Long Table, Brimscombe Mill: ‘share what you can, take what you need.’ And there, about a hundred miles from Paddington, by the canal and by the railway line, the Stroud Brewery with its organic beer and sustainability awards and an unconscious echo of the Brimscombe engine shed: ‘we harvest rainwater off our roof to flush our toilets’.
And there, at the Meadow, the home of Brimscombe & Thrupp AFC, Peter Baxendale, rightly declaring: ‘There’s no finer sight in football than a winger flying down the touchline as trains from Paddington make their way down the valley to Cheltenham.’
It’s a mercurial thing, Heritage.