47 



CHELTENHAM IN THE OLDEN DAYS." 



BY A. S. OWEN, ESQ. 



STRANGER visiting Cheltenham might perhaps wonder 

 how it could be said to have any history at all ; 

 everything wears such a modern appearance that it 

 might be thought that there was nothing to interest 

 the archeeological student in the place. But although 

 we cannot claim for the town that it has the same 

 historic interest as its neighbours of Gloucester and 

 Tewkesbury, we shall find that there is enough in the past of 

 Cheltenham to interest us and lend additional interest to the present. 

 The oldest building in Cheltenham of which there is any record 

 is a cromlech found when the G.W.R. Station was being made, near 

 that part of the town called the Knapp, a name associated in these 

 parts with tumuli or barrows. Who the people were that erected 

 these things, and for what purpose they were erected, are much 

 disputed subjects. They may have been burial places, scenes of reli- 

 gious worship, or treasure chambers, but all we know is that they go 

 back to a period beyond any historic record in this country. This is 

 the only trace in the town, I believe, of a period before the coming 

 of the Romans, and it is unfortunate that even that is destroyed, but 

 there are numerous remains of the ancient Britons in the hills. 



To the Romans Gloucestershire was very important. The Severn 

 was for some time one of the frontiers of the Empire, and the Second 

 Augustian Legion was quartered in this shire to keep back the savage 

 Silurians. Gloucester and Cirencester were both Roman colonies, 

 and the Romans were so much scattered over the shire that we find 

 traces of them in one-third of the Gloucestershire parishes. Our own 

 local interest in them is that they altered the old British encamp- 

 ments on the neighbouring hills, and that they constructed a road 

 to connect their camps at Cleeve and Leckhampton. This road, 

 which from immemorial times constituted the parish boundary, I am 

 told, took the line of the Old Bath Road and Hales Road, which 

 gives that road a very creditable antiquity ; in one part of it a great 

 find of about i,ooo Roman coins, dating from the time of Claudius 



