I drove up the Fop Hill road from Uley crossroads and turned for Cam. The footpath up the hillside is on the left soon after the junction.
A notice at the ingress states that there was a smallpox isolation hospital on the hilltop, to the North, and to the South are pits and earthworks that maybe the remains of a mediaeval rabbit warren.
What a spectacular view all round from the top! The hill is an isolated outlier of Cam Long Down, rearing its small hogsback between Uley, Dursley and Cam. All sides are steep, but the access comes up from the easiest point, already some hundred feet higher than the surrounding fields. A buzzard is crying over the farm towards Uley, circling the beechwood beneath me and the valley. No one else is up here but me and the calls of birds ringing across the natural amphitheatre.
It has been a beautiful Summer day, exceedingly warm but with an eddying breeze to mollify the heat. The views towards the Severn are magnificent to the left and right of Cam Peak and Cam Long Down. It's just a wonderful place, high up here above the world. The vista truly brings out the ring of wooded hills round Dursley, with Nibley's Tyndale monument standing sentinel over all in the distance.
I am sitting by the dumbly ground of the ancient warren. I've never really thought of it before, but the mediaeval farmers may have corralled and fenced off an area of ground and introduced wild rabbits into it to farm them. I believe that's what a Conigre or Conygre is. There are a good many Conygre farms and Coney woods across the country, and Coney is a dialect word for a rabbit. These must have been farmed warrens, trading in rabbit meat and skins for clothing etc. These pits are quite deep, perhaps five feet, and there are about six or seven each the circumference of a mini roundabout. One could be forgiven for assuming these pits are neolithic hut-circles.
Along the brow of the hill is a double line of mature sycamores, an avenue the length of the whole hogsback, planted, I assume at the time of the smallpox hospital. All that remains of the isolation unit are three or four trenches at the North end. These must have been dwellings, partly dug into the hill for shelter and protection. It is easy to imagine these long huts with their rows of beds housing the suffering and the dying.
When? Would this be about 1800 or later? The rough steep track up here, long since collapsed and overgrown would have been quite a haul for a horse with a cartload of poor creatures.
I must say it's the perfect place to pick for isolation. Once you are up here, the world can pass you by in the valley. The patients must have taken the air at times along the avenue of trees, low then but affording a modicum of interest on an otherwise barren top. It is sad to think of these stricken souls ending their days away from their loved ones, but a lot nearer Heaven up here.
There is a stiffish East wind blowing across the top now, rushing in the tall sycamores. but at 7 o'clock it is still very warm.
I have walked over to the West side of the hill now. I described it as a hogsback, a ridge, but in reality the steepest scarp is to the East, and this West-facing hillside drops in a slow slope to the valley floor with bracken climbing almost to the sycamore avenue. It is moderately flat for 40 yards on the very brow where the double line of trees stand majestically.
The sun hangs a milky haze over the river Severn, where sheep bleat, rooks argue and a green woodpecker calls.
This place could be my version of Richard Jefferies' Liddington Hill. I may walk up here often to commune with the cosmos. Beauty and soul-life is here.
On the way back,, reading the notice again, it suggests that the rabbit warren is on the North flank - that is, where I felt the isolation unit was. I felt that the the isolation unit was the dumbly ground where I first sat. Somehow I don't want to believe this, except that the tree avenue would then have led the wagons and horses imposingly to the dwellings. I fail to see how those pits I wrote of could once have been footings of buildings, even in the dilapidated state they are now in. There is no stone anywhere - were the buildings all wooden? Surely something solid would be visible, like slate or tiles. But it's all gone, no trace but these pits.
Smallpox hill is veiled in history, leaving many questions strewn across its grassy peak.
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