Cirencester in Stone
J McCall & P Copestake
Published by: Gloucestershire Geology Trust
Publication date: 2008
ISBN: 978-1-90453-009-1
List price: £4.95
49 pp
www.glosgeotrust.org.uk
This attractively printed volume sits well alongside the similar volume edited by Joe McCall a decade earlier, Gloucester in Stone. The older booklet benefited from many pen drawings to draw the reader’s attention to pertinent details - and a wall game too. Unfortunately, although the new volume contains many colourful digital images, the absence of hand-drawn figures and annotations to the images means that the ability to focus on detail is left to the experience of the reader, thereby losing some of the potential instructive value.
The Gloucestershire Geology Trust is responsible for both publications, with the later book aimed at encouraging a wider public to value its stone heritage. Cirencester contains a wealth of historically interesting buildings and the widespread use of stone makes it a fascinating study area. The newcomer to the town will welcome the clear foldout street map within the front cover (which doubles as a bookmark); but there is no scale and the user is left to presume that North is at the top!
Although its A5 size makes the book suitable for the pocket and provides sufficient pages for the information needed to describe a worthwhile walk around the town, unfortunately an unnecessarily small, plain and rather thin font has been employed. Plenty of room remains between the lines for a larger style but this reviewer did not find the main text easy to read - in contrast to the information panels, which are much clearer.
In terms of content, the Geology of Cirencester chapter is more a Geology of Gloucestershire. This section would have benefited from a more focused map of the vicinity of Cirencester, marking the quarries of relevance to the supply of stone to the town (historical and current) rather than the currently-working quarries alone. The Cotswolds are not actually marked on this map; stratigraphical terms are employed that are not shown on the succession (e.g. Bajocian and Bathonian), and when was the Cenozoic or indeed the Pleistocene?
Non-geological readers will no doubt be confused by the multiplicity of such terms with no recourse to explanations in the text and no glossary. Moreton-in-Marsh is not shown, and so the location of the ice sheets remains a mystery.
Once into the geological trail, the layout for each site is good. Clear banners indicate the location, and directions are given in italics. Information is imparted in digestible quantities through good use of captions and boxes. The book ends with a brief “bibliography” (really just a reading list), but why are no websites given, to encourage the reader to delve more deeply into the subject?
For some reason the outer sites employ a different numbering sequence (21 to 23 would have been clearer than returning to a new 1 to 3 sequence). They would also have benefited from details of either walking distances or parking facilities. Furthermore, neither the map nor the site description give any idea how to access the Royal Agricultural College – perhaps emphasising the need for such books to be proof-read by someone less familiar with the town in question.
There are nevertheless strengths within this book - the nice presentation inviting the reader to walk around the town with their eyes focused on the building stones. It is also good to see the final page giving attention to the current extractive industries.
Mike Rosenbaum, Ludlow