22 
t 
THE AGRICULTURE OF THE 
COTSWOLDS. 
AGRICULTURISTS from every part of England who visited the 
Royal Show at Bristol this year must naturally have been 
interested in what they could observe of the farming practice 
of the County of Gloucester, but they can have seen very little 
of the Cotswold Hills unless they made a special pilgrimage 
with that object. Those who came from the North and 
Midlands passed through the beautiful and fertile vale of the 
Severn. Travellers from South Wales, and also from the 
extreme West, were hardly in the county at all until they 
found themselves in the Showyard, and only those from the 
South and East who came through Swindon may have had a 
view of a few miles of the Cotswolds in the neighbourhood 
of Badminton. But although the hills are physically unsuited 
to railways requiring easy gradients they possess many interest- 
ing agricultural features, and a charm that appeals to every 
Gloucestershire man. > 
As to the name, some etymologists derive “ Cotteswold 
(to give the name its ancient spelling) from two synonymous 
elements, the Celtic Coed and the Anglo Saxon Weald , both 
denoting a wood, and these hills were once largely cohered 
with trees, of which beech was the prevailing species, yielding 
pannage for the herds of long-legged black swine, from which, 
in prehistoric times, neolithic man derived a great part of his 
sustenance. 
The Cotswolds are part of the great chain of Stonebrash 
hills interspersed with clay vales, which extends from Dorset- 
shire through the Counties of Wilts, Gloucester, Bedford, 
Northampton, and Lincoln, into Yorkshire. In Gloucester- 
shire they form an elevated tableland, which on the south 
flanks the Avon at Bath, on the west and north-west forms a 
steep escarpment, below which are the Yales of Evesham, 
Gloucester, and Berkeley, and on the east and south-east 
gradually dips to the Yales of Moreton and the upper Thames. 
Its greatest length is close on sixty miles, and the greatest 
breadth about fifteen miles, its area being about 300,000 
acres. Along the western edge it rises from 700 to 900 ft. 
above sea level, and at two or three points in the northern 
part, notably near Cheltenham, it attains a height of over 
1,000 ft. The only important depression in the escarpment 
is the valley leading into the Stroud Yalley, through the latter 
of which the Great Western Railway runs from London to 
Gloucester. 
