VOL. XVIII. (2) CLIMATE & TOPOGRAPHY, CHELTENHAM 151 



eligible site vi^here drainage was easy, pure water available and 

 the lands fertile in woods, fields and meadows. The sunny 

 slopes were inviting, and the villages of Charlton Kings and 

 Cheltenham, forming at first but one manor and always 

 contiguous and closely associated, arose along the length of 

 the brook, where its valley was widening and debouching to the 

 more open country. 



For many hundreds of years the place was but of village 

 dimensions, until the pleasantness of its position in the midst 

 of as clean and rural a country as England possesses became 

 known to the outside world. This took place when the local 

 mineral waters had been discovered and the fashion prevailed of 

 drinking such waters for various ailments. Then the town 

 expanded, and filled the whole space between the hills until 

 it touched the hill- foot villages of Prestbury and Leckhampton, 

 and extended along the main road that led through Cheltenham 

 from London and Oxford. 



The hills above-mentioned, which lie behind Cheltenham 

 and upon the sides of the town, are a part of the Cotteswold 

 Hills, which form a long escarpment that passes almost from 

 one extreme end to the other of Gloucestershire, and is abutted 

 upon the edge of the broad Severn Valley. Some island- 

 hills, or outliers, standing out from the main hill mass, as if 

 detached from a high coast, assist with the intervening and more 

 regular heights to form a broad enclosing crescent, in the hollow 

 and centre of which this town has its place, as may be well 

 seen from any of the nearer hill-tops. 



The Lias Clay, which is chiefly responsible for the surface- 

 features of this part of the Severn Vale, passes under and 

 about Cheltenham, and extends up the Cotteswold escarpment, 

 to pass beneath the limestone rocks which are characteristic 

 of these hills. The clay in and about the town is waved into 

 an irregular surface that varies the altitude and appearance 

 of the ground, especially towards the hills, down whose slopes 

 there has also been some tumbUng over of the superimposed 

 Inferior Oolite. The more definite minor hills thus formed 

 produce some gentle gradients in the town and on its outskirts, 

 the most prominent of which are known as Battledown, Marie 



