Littledean Woodside - Joseph TINGLE of Flaxley (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Monday, February 26, 2024, 22:04 (302 days ago) @ Bradley Tingle

Hi Donna,
you're very welcome for my interest, most enjoyable for me to try to help out. Apologies for perhaps repeating what you already knew, I hadn't realised you'd already and quite literally trodden this ground in the past, and with Ian and Dave you most definitely had the right people to show you around !.

Here's an earlier edition of the map Slowhands posted, from about 1880, and as you say at that time it was labelled as Pingle's Pit.
https://maps.nls.uk/view/101453373

For the next edition from 1901 they'd corrected their error.
https://maps.nls.uk/view/101453370

As kids in the 70s we spent most of our school holidays "muckin about" in the Forest around Cinderford, sometimes cycling south thro' Soudley to the Middleridge area around Blackpool Brook and ponds, or more west to Cannop ponds and Speech House woods. If it wasn't the fishing season, or was just too hot and sunny for such things, we'd cycle up and into the denser conifer woods in the Edgehills / Collafield area. We spent long summer days hidden away in the shade, building camps and suchlike, and always on the lookout for the old mine shafts which thankfully were pretty-well sealed, not that we were adventurous or daft enough to try to enter them. However we did try dislodging stones from the top of the sheer faces of the disused quarries at Edgehills, a "game" that terrified me, or clambering on the old buildings and fishing the pit ponds at Fairplay to the north. We also visited the radio mast that you saw, although if my memory serves me right (I've not lived in the Dean for 40 years now), in those days it was a Fire lookout tower, before the age of telecomms.
I just wish we'd had access to these great old maps, would have saved us getting lost a few times !

Thanks again to you Donna for helping take me back to these great days, we were so very lucky having such a wonderful playground on our doorstep.

atb J.