The Tolsey, Wotton-Under-Edge

Image: © Derek Harper Taken: 2 Jan 2010

On the corner of Market Street and featuring Image on the facade facing Long Street. Tolsey means tollbooth or merchants' trading place, and crops up in several places in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The building with its hexagonal cupola is "C16 with C18 exterior" http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=128193&mode=adv . "A clock existed here, at the top of the high street in Wotton, in the 17th century. Various repairs were carried out on the clock over the years. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the driving mechanism of the clock was in the loft of the Tolsey building. A man was employed regularly to wind it up and look after it. A plaque on the clock lists some of the people who wound the clock up manually ... to celebrate {Queen Victoria's} Diamond Jubilee in 1897 the present clock, which juts out into the high street, was installed, replacing the octagonal shaped one. More recently, the original portraits of Queen Victoria were replaced with new ones painted by Wotton-under-Edge artist Robert Collins, who worked from an 1897 Diamond Jubilee picture of Queen Victoria which decorated a mug" http://www.klbschool.org.uk/interactive/history/local_history.htm .

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