On Wednesday afternoon, members of the public who had registered their interest in doing so were given time to speak, with the proviso they didn't repeat what others had said.
Jean Saunders spoke first giving a highly illuminating talk about the area, then Mr Wood, Andrew Bennett, Felicity Cobb who talked at length about collecting 18000 out of the 52000 signatures for the petition. Tim French gave a moving presentation about what Coate and it's surroundings means to him, and lastly Adrian Moor talked about traffic and leisure activities conflicting.
Jean has today emailed an article in December 2011's edition of The Oldie page 65 which I thought I'd include:
Unwrecked England
The Richard Jefferies Museum and Landscape,
Swindon
Candida Lycett Green
[inset
picture of Liddington Hill with caption: Liddington
Hill: 'By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty
circumstances and the annoyances of existence' (Richard Jefferies)]
Swindon's Great Western heart is the same as it ever was
and the local character of some of the town's centre has stayed intact. For the
last few decades however, its anonymous suburbs have sprawled so far that you
need to be an orienteer to find your way around the relentless,
could-be-anywhere housing developments, industrial estates and clutches of
titanic superstores. Vast tracts of farmland as well as woods and copses I knew
as a child are now under concrete: whole villages have been swallowed up.
But there is one corner left untouched - the gentle,
pastoral landscape which was the inspiration of Swindon’s famous son, Richard
Jefferies, one of our greatest country writers and visionaries. 'One day the
area will be glorified,' Edward Thomas wrote in his biography of Jefferies,
'It will be known as Jefferies' Landscape and it will be as Selborne was to
Gilbert White.'
If you take the very smallest road off the Coate
roundabout you can park under trees beside Coate Water, the setting for
Jefferies' classic children's book Bevis: The Story of a Boy. 'So we
will,' said Bevis, 'we will find a new sea where no one has ever been before.
Look! There it is; is it not wonderful?' And it is.
This expansive and gracefully sinuous reservoir
was created in the 1820s by the Wilts and Berks Canal Company as a means of
topping up the canal. When I went there were dozens of fishermen around its
edges, an abandoned 1930s concrete diving board hovering over it, and children
flying kites nearby. A new cinder path leads along the familiar hedgeline to
Coate Farmhouse where Jefferies was born in 1848 and which is now looked after
by Richard Jefferies Society volunteers. Although the adjacent road has now
become a dual carriageway, once you are through the front door you feel calm. It
is one the nicest museums you could wish for - well loved, cosy and intimate.
From the living room there is a view of the mulberry tree mentioned in a poem
and the deep shade of the evergreen oak planted by Richard's father. From
his study-cum-teenage-bedroom on the attic floor, his simple drop-leaved writing
table stands where it always did, by the window which looks onto the
orchard and
the Sun Inn
beyond.
There are letters written by
the seven-year-old Richard to his beloved aunt Ellen; photographs of
local farm workers squinting against the sun together with the gangly gamekeeper
of Burderop Park from whom Jefferies learnt so much; beautiful sketches by his
uncle and lots of small oils and watercolours of nearby scenes painted
by an early Jefferies groupie.
Kate Tryon lived in Massachusetts and was a keen Thoreau enthusiast,
but as soon as she read Jefferies
she became obsessed. She visited Coate for twelve consecutive years in the
early 1900s, following in her hero's footsteps and illustrating his every
literary description. The landscape is still magical
even though the M4 slices through it a mile or so away. The trees and woods
around Day House Farm, along the lane from the Jefferies' smallholding, are
just as they were when Tryon painted them. (The
farmhouse itself was the
home of Jessie
Baden, who became Richard's wife: he wrote of their courtship in Greene Ferne
Farm). It seems unbelievable that despite the large number of
brownfield sites in Swindon, Persimmon
and Redrow are appealing to build 900 houses here. It will
kill Richard Jefferies' landscape
stone dead.
• Candida
Lycett Green's new book Seaside Resorts is now available. , 'If there's a
better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I'd like to see
it’: Cressida Connolly, the Spectator.
