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.
Still in the Time of Covid. So much so that 'we' visited the NHS Pharmaxo vaccination centre at the Fiveways Industrial Estate on Saturday, 21st August 2021 (see picture below). Sunday brought a short walk to Boxfields, Quarry Wood and the Quarryman's. The title picture shows beeches on the top path in Quarry Wood.
The Pharmaxo NHS vaccination centre at Fiveways Industrial Estate
The old Hawthorn Post Office, now a BT exchange, at the junction of Park Lane and Westwells Road
Didn't realise that Tunnel Inn was up for sale
The site of the old quarry in Boxfields Road where lie the remains of the Boxfields bungalows
Wheat is now harvested and straw baled (far left) - Chapel Plaister lies on the horizon in this view from Boxfields
More images of the harvested wheat field and Chapel Plaister follow in the gallery below. Select the icon with outward-pointing arrows to enlarge the pictures. Wadswick (Country Store etc) and Kingsmoor Wood also feature.
Unfortunate fence and sign in Quarry Wood (detracts from the sense of wild, 'natural' woodland)
Here, a sheer drop has been shielded by brushwood
One of the entrances (possibly Lady Hamilton 2) to the old freestone workings in Quarry Wood blocked by Hanson in July 2017
A pagan fence and preposterous sign in Quarry Wood, again detracting from any sense of this being a wild, 'natural' woodland
The ridiculous sign shown above erected by the new 'pagan' owner of this section of the wood, declares 'CCTV in use' (with an image of a camera), 'Danger Keep out', 'Protected by witchcraft', 'All trespassers will be prosecuted' along with an image that I can't make out (looks like a balloon with fingers). I hadn't appreciated that paganism was synonymous with narrow-mindedness. Such creeping urbanisation of our relatively few 'wild' spaces is becoming increasingly prevalant ... and talking of narrow-mindedness, if you wander through Ashley, towards its western end there are a few houses/bungalows before Black John's smallholding and on the gatepost of one of these, there is a sign which proclaims 'Strictly Private, No Parking or Turning' - what a strange name for a house.
Pagan barrier to Quarry Wood
The remains of the old building at Mr Smith's market garden at the bottom end of Quarry Wood - now in pagan hands
Pagan symbolism in Quarry Wood?
Bannerdown and Lansdown from Boxfields
Hemp agrimony at Box Hill Common
Wild carrot (Queen Anne's lace) and ragwort at Box Hill Common
Parking for the annual Leafy Lane Playing Fields/AFC Corsham 6-a-side football tournament at the site of the flat-roofed Boxfields bungalow estate in Boxfields Road (now owned by the Paynes of Park Farm, Colerne)
The site, at left, of Stan Webb's shop in Boxfields Road; a poplar planted by Kevin Ford in the 1990s lies beyond the entrance to right-of-way BOX107A; the clump of trees at right shelters Webb's Stores Shaft (Delta Rectangle Shaft 1)
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