It has been said that “the test of a river is its power to drown a man.”  There is doubtless a peculiar grandeur about the roaring torrent; but to me there is a still greater charm in the gentle flow of a south country trout stream, such as abound in Hampshire, Wiltshire, and in the Cotswolds.  I do not think the Coln is capable of drowning a man, though one of the Peregrine family told me the other day that the only two men who ever bathed in our stream died soon afterwards from the shock of the intensely cold water!  But then, it must be remembered that the old prejudice against “cold water” still lingers amongst the country folk of Gloucestershire; so that this story must always be taken cum grano salis.

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There are few trout streams to our mind more delightful from the angler’s point of view than the Gloucestershire Coln.  Rising a few miles from Cheltenham, it runs into the Thames near Lechlade, and affords some fifteen miles or more of excellent fishing.  The scenery is of that quiet and homely type that belongs so exclusively to the chalk and limestone streams of the south of England.

From its source to the point at which it joins the Isis, the Coln flows continuously through a series of parks and small well-wooded demesnes, varied with picturesque Cotswold villages and rich water meadows.  It swells out into fishable proportions just above Lord Eldon’s Stowell property, steals gently past his beautiful woods at Chedworth and the Roman villa discovered a few years ago, then onward through the quaint old-world villages of Fossbridge to Winson and Coln-St-Dennis.  Though not a hundred miles from London, this part of Gloucestershire is one of the most primitive and old-fashioned districts in England.  Until the new railway between Andover and Cheltenham was opened, four years ago, with a small station at Fosscross, there were many inhabitants of these old-world villages who had never seen a train or a railway.  Only the other day, on asking a good lady, the wife of a farmer, whether she had ever been in London, I received the reply, “No, but I’ve been to Cheltenham.”  This in a tone of voice that meant me to understand that going to Cheltenham, a distance of about sixteen miles, was quite as important an episode in her life as a visit to London would have been.

On leaving Winson the Coln widens out considerably, and for the next two miles becomes the boundary between Mr. Wykeham-Musgrave’s property of Barnsley and the manor of Ablington.  It flows through the picturesque hamlet of Ablington, within a hundred yards of the old Elizabethan manor house, over an artificial fall in the garden, and passes onward on its secluded way through lovely woodland scenery, until it reaches the village of Bibury; here it runs for nearly half a mile parallel with the main street of the village, and then enters the grounds of Bibury Court.  I know no prettier village in England