Citizen John Thelwall, William Cobbett, and Rural Rides on the Train
In the summer of 1797, when the country feared a French invasion and the Fleet mutinied at the Nore and Spithead, ‘the most dangerous man in England’, ‘that Jacobin fox’, the republican, charismatic orator, John Thelwall, stayed in the Stroud area. This was an orator and poet who had been tried for treason, with a possible sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering …
He made his way here after staying with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Nether Stowey in Somerset. Three local clothiers offered him hospitality in Nailsworth, Bowbridge and Chalford. You can retrace his sojourn here with a walk along the old railway line from Stroud to Nailsworth, and with a walk along the canal by the side of the GWR line from Stroud, through Bowbridge, to Chalford. (Or there is a Cotswold Green morning bus to Cirencester; you can alight at Chalford and walk back.) You can find the toponym Chalford Bottom by the lineside on the OS map – coincidentally, Citizen John Thelwall wrote a beautiful poem in 1797 entitled On Leaving the Bottoms of Gloucestershire. Here are a few selected lines:
‘… pleasant haunts! brakes, bourns,
- And populous hill, and dale, and pendant woods;
- And you, meandering streams, and you, ye cots
- And hamlets, that, with many a whiten’d front,
- Sprinkle the woody steep; or lowlier stoop,
- Thronging, gregarious, round the rustic spire …
- Nor, as yet,
- Towers from each peaceful dell the unwieldy pride
- Of Factory over-grown; where Opulence
- Dispeopling the neat cottage, crowds his walls
- …to the yoke
- Of unremitting Drudgery …
- Therefore I love Chalford, and ye vales
- Of Stroud, irriguous …’
- A generation later, William Cobbett wrote thus in Rural Rides about Stroudwater: “These villages lie on the sides of a narrow and deep valley, with a narrow stream of water running down the middle of it, and this stream turns the wheels of a great many mills and sets of machinery for the making of woollen-cloth …There are steam-engines as well as water-powers …but … Even the buildings of the factories are not ugly … ‘
Come and see for yourself with some Rural Rides on the train!