History
The area that is now Bradley Stoke was farmland north of the village of Stoke Gifford. The heavy clay of the land made it difficult to grow anything and so the land was mostly used as pasture. The land was divided between the parishes of Stoke Gifford and Almondsbury. The area consisted of a number of farms, Bailey's Court and Watch Elm Farm in the south, Bowsland Farm and Manor Farm in the north and Webb's Farm in the middle. A number of woods also existed, Sherbourne's Brake, Webb's Wood and the large Savage's Wood have all been preserved. Fiddlers Wood, the name of which lives on in Fiddlers Wood Lane was all but obliterated by the M4 Motorway. Baileys Court Farmhouse is the only original building that exists and was used as offices by the towns developers before becoming the Bailey's Court Inn. Watch Elm Farm was named after a Watch Elm of legendary size that blew down in the mid 18th century. The Stoke Brook flows through the middle of Bradley Stoke.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)