138 



The Sixteenth General Meeting. 



road from Chippenham. Again, in Lackham woods he had himself 

 met with the remains of a pebble beach, 



Standing, as Chippenham did, on a ridge, in the middle of the 

 district, with a comparatively steep back to the river which ran on 

 three sides of it, it must in Saxon times have been a very defensible 

 place. He was not going to open Mr. Poulett Scrope's controversy; 

 but if any of them in going from Corsham to Castle Combe to- 

 morrow, were sufficiently well mounted to go round by Slaughterford, 

 they would see one of the most beautiful bits of country in the 

 neighbourhood, and in the village of Slaughterford the) 7 would find 

 the dwarf-elder which was said to have sprung from the blood of the 

 Danes. 



Alluding to the architecture of the country, Sir John said that 

 although there were parts of Eugland where real Roman buildings 

 existed, he did not know of any such in this county. But there 

 was one remarkable building at Bradford-on-Avon — small and not 

 very striking, to which no date could be assigned later than the 

 Saxon period. Of this building which was situated close to the 

 parish church, and was now used for the purposes of a free school, 

 Mr. Jones had given an admirable description in a paper published 

 in a former number of the Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine ; 1 

 and if anything practical could be done to secure so perfectly 

 unique a monument from destruction, it would be a great point not 

 only in our local history, but in the history of the building art in 

 England through the middle ages. In regard to the architecture 

 of their own immediate neighbourhood, he need not say much. 

 The parish church of Chippenham had some Norman points in it, 

 but not to a great extent : it had an Early English spire, which 

 was stated to have been once considerably higher than it now was. 

 This was obviously impossible unless the whole was taken down and 

 replaced. But the tower had certainly been altered at a very late 

 period of Gothic art. The mouldings of the Spire were certainly 

 original except where recently restored, and it would be a curious 

 fact if it were proved that those who could not imitate them had yet 

 taken them down and faithfully replaced them. As to the rest of 



1 Vol. v., p. 247. 



