Welcome to the Rudloe and environs website.

Here you will find news, articles and photos of an area that straddles the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in north-west Wiltshire.

Contributions in the form of articles or photos are welcome. Even those with completely contrary views to mine!

Thanks to the website builder 1&1 and Rob Brown for the original idea.

Rudloescene now, in January 2014, has a sister, academic rather than anarchic, website about Box history here: http://www.boxpeopleandplaces.co.uk/

It contains thoroughly professional, well-researched articles about Box and its people.

Contact rudloescene through the 'Contact' page.

I used to think I was a fungi down at the pub but there wasn't too mushroom at the bar. Stir crazy after four months of lockdown, the Rudloe litter picks restarted on Sunday 5th July 2020 and here we find a tunnel fungus (possibly) in the Bradford Road woodland adjacent to the school.

#Ten black bottles chucked in a bush, ten black bottles chucked in a bush, and if one black bottle ... These (and the pane) were hauled out of the bushes behind the seat on the corner opposite the Rudloe Arms. Found and photographed by Madeleine Wright during the August 2020 Rudloe litter pick.

The poisoned hedgerow has reminded me of recent Internet searches trying to identify tiny flowers growing in our lawn. The 'assumption' made by the search engine was that I wanted to kill the plants I was searching for. The hedgerow in the picture above is just the latest example of our destructive nature - not long back, a sycamore at the 'bottom end' of Rudloe Estate (just a hundred yards along the road here) was felled and the stump poisoned to prevent coppicing (see article elsewhere).

The text below the sign further says that it was funded by Box Parish Council, Wiltshire Council and the GreenSquare Group and the design, manufacture and installation was by members of the Brunel Shed. A fine sign it is and congratulations to all those involved in its creation but ... (did you sense this coming?) why give Rudloe Estate such an ornate 'village' sign when renowned villages such as Lacock and Castle Combe do not have them? Rudloe Estate was the original (prefab) estate at Rudloe but wasn't the first 'bricks and mortar' estate - this claim to fame goes to the RAF estates off Leafy Lane. And Rudloe Estate is not Rudloe; Rudloe now takes in the other Leafy Lane estates: Springfield Close/Clift Close, Kidston Way/Highlands Close and Ashwood Road/Pine Close.

Communities (or villages) are not created by installing posh signs. Look behind the sign and you will see Rudloe Community Centre completed in 2002 at a cost not far short of £1 million and which that same GreenSquare organisation that part-funded the sign proposes to demolish. How's that for a deal? We will raze your £1 million community centre to the ground and give you a fancy sign that makes you look like a village. Also, the 'green' in front of the Community Centre is, effectively, a village green. It has been here for generations, since the days of the prefab estate, and was designated as Public Open Space in the North Wilts Open Space Study. One-hundred-and-four local people supported the application for Village Green status for the green in 2019. Now the GreenSquare organisation is threatening to build on the 'traditional' green whilst offering the sop of a replacement elsewhere. Another deal! We will build on your traditional green and give you a fancy sign that makes you look like a village.
 

And the sign was designed and produced by children from Broadwood School ... wait a minute, this school is in what now seems to be Rudloe Village (formerly Rudloe Estate) at Rudloe so why isn't it called Rudloe School or Corsham School, Rudloe Site? Would anyone out there care to speculate as to why this is?

Litter? We collected some in the village.

6th September 2020 finds David and John P venturing forth in the Bradford Road on the Rudloe litter-pick. The yellow lines were finally painted here in the winter of 2014/15 following the installation of a new school gate in September 2010. One of the many emails sent on this subject read as follows: "Once again, I'm afraid, I have to pen my incredulity that the authorities, including the executive head of the school, the governors, Wilts CC (Health and Safety, Road Safety, Development Management, Area Board and so on), the Parish Council and the police and, indeed, the parents involved have instigated, presided over, acquiesced to or simply become users of this delinquent scheme." The full story of the gate (including a 70-page email chain over the course of three years or so) may be found here: school gate saga.