Footsteps into History - Petty France

This week Gerry Brooke heads for the Cotswolds to visit two hamlets on the A46

Both Dunkirk and Petty France on the A46 have a Gallic ring to them - but does that mean they have any connection with France?

It’s been suggested that some members of the Huguenot weaving community, seeking refuge from religious persecution in France in the 18th century, settled here, on the edge of the Cotswolds, and named their settlement Dunkirk.

There is no real evidence to substantiate the story – but there is another Dunkirk name - Dunkirk Mills, a few miles away in Stroud.

The turnpike trust once had a toll house and gate at Dunkirk where travellers would be obliged to pay for use of the highway.

I think the hamlet’s name is going to remain a mystery - but what about Petty France, once part of the Badminton estate?

There is a France Lane near Hawkesbury Upton, but that’s no real help.

In his guide to Gloucestershire Arthur Mee states, although he cites no evidence, that there was a Napoleanic prisoner of war camp here.

Folk memory, he says, recalls gangs Frenchmen repairing the roads in the area.

But as the name appears in the Hawkesbury parish rate books for 1706, at least a century previously, that theory goes straight out the window.

So the origins of that name, too, must remain something of a mystery.

Did Petty France’s Bodkin House Hotel originate, as legend has it, from a medieval priory destroyed by King Henry VIII’s henchmen during the dissolution of the monasteries.

I find the story unlikely.

Now an up market hotel and restaurant the building was once a coaching inn serving the busy Bath to Gloucester route.

With a 200 year old cedar tree still in the courtyard, it has since been extended and upgraded.

Parson Woodforde, the well known Somerset diarist, refreshed himself here while on his way home from Oxford to Castle Cary.

And Jane Austen, who came here as a child, later gave the inn a mention in her novel Northanger Abbey, which she finished in 1798/9.

Other visitors, filming in the area, have included actors Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, James Fox and Hugh Grant.

The Petty France Hotel, opposite, is unfortunately a hotel no more since the owner Bill Fraser, moved away.

The stables, coach house and barn have now converted into mews houses.