‘Stock’s Wood is believed to be one of the few remaining parts of the Great Forest of Arden’ declares the sign erected by the Bournville Village Trust. This small rectangle of woodland, designated a Site of Interest for Nature Conservation, is fenced off and locked up, a museum closed to visitors.
Church, State and Monarch in Elizabethan England were as consubstantial as the Trinity. To hold religious views that did not conform to the established religion was to court danger, disaster and death. The modern, secular distinction between a public and private sphere was unimagined, and outlawed rituals carried out within the walls of one’s own home were viewed as a direct threat to that trinity of the English state.
In 1906, George Cadbury, visionary industrialist, chocolate magnate and founder of the remarkable model village Bournville, visited Bruges in Belgium. While there he heard the famous carillon of the Belfry of Bruges and decided, there and then, that Bournville should have a carillon too.