Dymock - Forest ? (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Friday, March 01, 2013, 18:53 (4286 days ago) @ jhopkins

Hi J,
I'm happy to be considered wrong but in my experience people from Dymock wouldn't call themselves Foresters. The area is essentially flat very fertile farmland more akin to the Severn Vale just east of the Forest but with the deep red soil that I associate with adjacent Herefordshire, whereas the forested uplands a little to the southwest is the quintessential Dean Forest. Nowadays Dymock is often associated with fields full of wild daffodills.
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/?About_the_Forest

http://www.dymock.org.uk/

However it's still a delightful part of glorious Glostershire and I'm more than happy to have close links to both the area & it's inhabitants, it's only a few miles "out" of the woods so clearly there will be plenty of family ties both ways, especially since the Industrial Revolution took over from agriculture as the major employer 150 odd years ago and no doubt families moved from Dymock into the Dean to work as they did both ways between Ponty & physically similar Dean. It therefore makes complete sense to include Dymock PRs in this website.

In case you haven't done so this Map should help place Dymock wrt the Forest area in general. If you select the satelite "hybrid" photo and zoom out you can see the "traditional" true Forest is the dark areas to the southwest, I would say by the time you've driven north as far as the A40 road abt Longhope/Lea then you're leaving the Forest as such and the colourful patchwork of fields becomes the norm.
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/maps/parishmap.php

I doubt people of Dymock ever spoke the true Forest dialect, but then again not many born & bred Foresters do either thesedays & haven't for a few generations. We (I'm from Cinderford) certainly did and still do say "anyroad" and we never spoke true Forest, but what few references I've found suggest this is more a Northern England phrase, so ????. Perhaps we picked it up from miners down from Durham or Yorks ?. I'd be very interested in anyone else's views ??
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anyroad

I still remember when my older sister got her first job all of 15 miles away in a bank in Gloucester in the mid 70s; she came home complaining some of them considered Foresters as almost from another planet or at least the backwoods !, despite her not having a strong Forest dialect. Dymock's a similar distance/travelling time from Cinderford so maybe their inhabitants would have thought the same of us ?. However given we are both from rural areas, so both unlike the city of Gloucester, I wonder if despite the longer distance apart they'd feel more akin to Foresters rather than the citizens of the nearer yet "farther apart" Gloucester ???

If you've ever read any of my posts you'll know I love the Genuki website as a way of getting to know an area from a Victorian viewpoint. In it I see no suggestion tying Dymock to Dean.
http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/GLS/Dymock/Gaz1868.html

Another section of Genuki gives a very useful guide to placing a town wrt the official local government Districts during the C19th & C20th, Dymock is listed under Newent.
http://www.ukbmd.org.uk/genuki/reg/districts/newent.html

Hope this helps if only a little, I'm sure much of this you'll have seen before.