The Pillertons' Location Page

Other Pages ----------------- Locality Church Events Rota Home Links |  | Return to Home Page The area of Warwickshire South & East of the Avon is known as the "Feldon" from the Anglo-Saxon "feld" meaning an open area or field. Unlike the "Forest of Arden", which is North & West of the Avon, the Feldon was cleared of timber and cultivated from the first few centuries AD. Centuries of ploughing the heavy soils has created the common "ridge & furrow" landscape that characterises the Feldon. Until the 12th & 13th centuries the Feldon was well populated, however the black death, and the wool trade, set in train a population decline. Also the clearing of the Forest of Arden to provide charcoal for iron smelting, opened up areas of more tractable land which encouraged the turning of the Feldon over to sheep pasture. The process of enclosing the large fields with hawthorn hedges continued gradually through to the 19th century, producing the regular hedged landscape of today. Within the Feldon is the "Vale of the Red Horse", which stretches from Kineton & Edge Hill along the foot of the Cotswold escarpment South West to the Stour Valley. The Vale takes it's name from the figure of a horse cut into the red, iron-rich, soil of the hillside above Tysoe. Talk to the locals and you will be told of several locations for the horse, as there were five different horses cut over the years, none of which survive. The Reverend George Miller in his book Rambles round the Edge Hills, published in 1896, states that the horse probably dates from the Anglo-Saxon conquests, dismissing the (perhaps) more popular theory that it was cut by Warwick the Kingmaker after the Battle of Towton in 1461. Miller gives the dimensions of the horse, for example :- "from shoulder to ear 14 feet", "from ear to nose 7½ feet", and "the diameter of the eye 1 foot 2 inches". "The" horse was destroyed about 1798 and afterwards the owners of the Sunrising Inn cut another close by, trying to keep up the annual fair connected with the scouring, held on Palm Sunday. The Pillertons' are situated on the rising ground on the opposite side of the Vale to the escarpment. This higher ground, which separates the Vale from the valley proper of the Avon, was the route the Romans chose for the Fosseway with a grand disregard for gravity. The Fosseway parallels an ancient Saltway running along the top of the escarpment, taking in the hill fort of Nadbury Camp which overlooks the battlefield of Edgehill (October 1642).