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.

24th June 2018 and it's high summer on the Bradford Road at Rudloe. The biblical quotation 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do' comes to mind as Wiltshire Council blunders about the countryside spraying weedkiller, misidentifying shrubs as Japanese knotweed and cutting back verges to within a millimetre of their lives. Here we see the Bradford Road verge which, in years gone by, was flush with wild strawberries now just a patch of bare earth. One strawberry plant remains which may be seen in the gallery below.

Saturday's (June 24th) Times 'Nature Notebook' column extolled the virtues of the wildlife charity Plantlife and included the following 'Roadsides often support spectacular verge floras that can delight travellers ... and we all need a regular dose of nature's beauty'. The charity has produced  a Good Verge Guide which states that early and frequent cutting reduces plant diversity by encouraging coarse grasses and other vigorous plants such as cow parsley which then require more cutting. The guide argues that it is best to cut once, between mid-July and late September. Earlier cutting destroys attractive summer flowers such as betony, field scabious, knapweeds and orchids. And wild strawberries!

Wiltshire Council's website illustrates their 'verge' mentality: Wiltshire council both actively and routinely maintains the following areas to ensure they do not pose any threats:

• Grass cutting
• Hedge maintenance
• Trees
• Weeds and spraying operations
• Shrub maintenance

Threats! Is Wiltshire threatened by triffids? Maybe a 21st-century remake, The Day of the Wild Strawberries, of John Wyndham's classic is in the offing. But really, this is preposterous - threats from hedges, verges and weeds indeed!

I would propose to Wiltshire Council and Box Parish Council that, following the daffodil planting in Leafy Lane undertaken by residents of Springfield Close many years ago, 'we' now plant wild flower verges in Rudloe in the manner of those wild areas to be found in Sydney Gardens in Bath - see the first picture below.