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.

Around Rudloe and Boxfields in mid-October 2015

4th October 2015 - autumn comes to the condemned trees and meadow at Rudloe

Should Hannick speculative planning application 13/05724/OUT finally come to fruition, the Bradford Road trees and meadow shown in the gallery below will be just a memory. This planning application had a peculiar gestation with, amongst others, official bodies such as Corsham Town Council, Box Parish Council and CPRE (yes the Campaign to Protect Rural England!) supporting it.This is perhaps unsurprising as Box Parish Council (and Wiltshire CPRE) seems perfectly willing to throw Rudloe to the wolves (landowners/developers) whilst guarding closely the precincts of Box (it should be noted that, at the time and perhaps even now, the chairman of Box Parish Council and the vice-chairman of Wiltshire CPRE were one and the same).

Peculiar gestation? Somehow, Wiltshire Council forgot (an "oversight" apparently) to require a full bat survey as has been done on all other west Corsham applications in view of the proximity of the Bath and Bradford Area of Special Conservation (the Box Mine SSSI). Natural England was not consulted. All other west Corsham proposed developments (except Gladman of course) are held up over bats.

And the bizarre circumstances reported in the 13th January 2014 article (see 'News', 'Rudloe'), whereby within hours (or perhaps minutes) of receiving the news from Wiltshire Council that no Environmental Impact Assessment would be required for this proposal, the developer's agent contacted Mrs Fiona Allen, the executive head of Corsham School, have never been explained.

I don't know about bats but I smell rats.

I have also included in the gallery below photos taken in Skynet Drive on 8th October 2015.