Resumen de Radway, Warwickshire: the making of a landscape
William G. Hawkes, Anthony Wood
About five railes north-west of Banbury, beyond the Oxfordshire border, the hilly country suddenly ends at the steep escarpment of Edge Hill. From the top there was in the eighteenth century a celebrated view, now partly obscured by trees, which then stretched across the Warwickshire plain to the hills far beyond, a view that was enthusiastically described in 1896 as including 12 counties. From the bottom of the upper escarpment the ground slopes more gently down for about a third of a mile to Radway Grange on the level of the plain. This house, built of the beautiful local stone around 1600, originally with twin gables on each of the four sides, stands towards the western end of the small village. Beyond was part of the Radway common field and on a rising ground to the north, just across the parish boundary, was fought on 23 October 1642 the battle of Edge Hill, the.first great battle in the Civil War. Near the edge of the escarpment is a cluster of houses (also called Edgehill) which is dominated by an octagonal, four-storeyed tower (now part of the village inn) with battlements, an emphatic machicolation and also with a separate fore-building by the roadside that acts as a kind of barbican. This tower, which looks down towards the Grange and the site of the battlefield beyond, was once the climax of the landscape designed for himself by Sanderson Miller, well known as one of the pioneers of the Gothic revival of the mid-eighteenth century.
