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On the southern fringes of the Cotswolds, CIRENCESTER makes a
refreshing change from its more gentrified neighbours, steering clear of
the "olde-worlde" image that many Cotswold towns have embraced. Under
the Romans, the town was called Corinium and ranked second only to
Londinium in size and importance. A provincial capital and a centre of
trade, it flourished for three centuries and had one of the largest
forums north of the Alps. Few Roman remains are visible in Cirencester
itself thanks to the destruction meted out by the Saxons in the sixth
century. The new occupiers built an abbey (the longest in England at the
time), but the town's prosperity was restored only with the wool boom of
the Middle Ages, when the wealth of local merchants financed the
construction of one of the finest Perpendicular churches in England.
Cirencester has survived as one of the most affluent towns in the area,
hence the much-vaunted title "Capital of the Cotswolds".
Cirencester's heart is the Market Place , on Mondays and Fridays packed
with traders' stalls. An irregular line of eighteenth-century facades
along the north side contrasts with the heavier Victorian structures
opposite, but the parish church of St John the Baptist , built in stages
during the fifteenth century, dominates. The extraordinary flying
buttresses which support the tower had to be added when it transpired
that the church had been constructed upon a filled-in ditch. Its grand
three-tiered south porch, the largest in England - big enough to
function as the town hall at one stage - leads to the nave, where
slender piers and soaring arches create a wonderful sense of space,
enhanced by clerestory windows that bathe the nave in a warm light. The
church contains much of interest, including a colourful wineglass pulpit
, carved in stone in around 1450 and one of the few pre-Reformation
pulpits to have survived in Britain. North of the chancel, superb fan
vaulting hangs overhead in the chapel of St Catherine , who appears in a
still vivid fragment of a fifteenth-century wall painting. In the
adjacent Lady Chapel , look out for two good seventeenth-century
monuments. Outside, one of the best views of the church is from the
Abbey Grounds ; site of the Saxon abbey, it's now a small park skirted
by the modest river Churn and a fragment of the Roman city wall.
Few medieval buildings other than the church have survived in
Cirencester. The houses along the town's most handsome streets - Park,
Thomas and Coxwell - date mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. One of those on Park Street houses the Corinium Museum
(Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; £2.50), which devotes itself mainly to the
Roman era. Given that the museum has one of the largest Roman
collections in Britain, the number of exhibits on display is
disappointing, but a lot of space is taken up by mosaic pavements ,
which are among the finest in the country, and the reconstructed
triclinium (dining room with couches), kitchen, peristyle and butcher's
shop.
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