Daneway House, Cirencester, Cromwell's carving

The day we travelled to Stow-on-the-Wold, we also toured several other places both coming and going. We were on a mission to find some Civil War battlegrounds and sites that were known and hoping to find some that weren’t.


We passed by the Daneway House and Daneway Woods, which my character in my new book perhaps passed by on her way to deliver a message to the Royalist army.

The House itself is very well-hidden down a well-treed lane, and the estate lands around it are immense.

One can see part of the original woods, where William Hancox (Hancocks) once carved his name in a tree, declaring that he was fighting for the Parliamentarians and was a Captain for Oliver Cromwell’s army. His neighbours at Sapperton House were Royalist fans and in fact, Charles I had actually spent a night there, dangerously close to his enemies. (See more about Sapperton House on its own blog page.)










We passed through Cirencester first and I stopped and took a quick photo of the Cirencester Agricultural College, which my grandfather attended in the early 1900s (Approx 1909 or 1910).

Then we went into Cirencester and took a quick look at the city. http://www.cotswolds.info/places/cirencester.shtml

I had made hasty notes, garnered from various sources about a major battle fought on 21 March in 1646 at Stow-on-the-Wold (Stow), so we set out to locate the spot. Apparently, this last decisive battle of the Civil War took place on a large hill that now divided by a highway (A424). I wanted to see the spot and get a feel of the expansiveness of where the fighting took place, so that I could better understand the strategies and complications. The only other tip I had was that it took place on Greenfield Farm. When we couldn’t find it easily, we decided to stop and ask.

However, no one seemed to have heard of that particular place. Then we came across one young man at a farm, who showed us a carving of Oliver Cromwell on the front of his house. Apparently his house had originally been a prison, then turned into a pub called the “Nibbles and Clink,” before becoming a residence that he now called “Nibbles.” He had heard of a Battle of Donnington and told us about people being out in the field across the road with metal detectors, etc. to look for relics, but he’d never heard of the Battle of Stow.

As Donnington was very close by, we drove into the village and again asked someone about the Battle of Donnington—at least it was of the same era and may have been one that wasn’t very well known—but he was baffled. He did say there had been a civil war battle in the area, but he thought it was called the Battle of Stow.. Of course, this was the one we were looking for. He gave us directions to find a monument down a zig-zaggy trail through a farmer’s land, though but he’d never heard of Greenfields. (See our results on the next Blog: Battle of Stow.)