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On the southern fringes of the Cotswolds, CIRENCESTER makes a refreshing change from its more gentrified neighbours, steering clear of the "olde-worlde" image that many Cotswold towns have embraced. Under the Romans, the town was called Corinium and ranked second only to Londinium in size and importance. A provincial capital and a centre of trade, it flourished for three centuries and had one of the largest forums north of the Alps. Few Roman remains are visible in Cirencester itself thanks to the destruction meted out by the Saxons in the sixth century. The new occupiers built an abbey (the longest in England at the time), but the town's prosperity was restored only with the wool boom of the Middle Ages, when the wealth of local merchants financed the construction of one of the finest Perpendicular churches in England. Cirencester has survived as one of the most affluent towns in the area, hence the much-vaunted title "Capital of the Cotswolds". Cirencester's heart is the Market Place , on Mondays and Fridays packed with traders' stalls. An irregular line of eighteenth-century facades along the north side contrasts with the heavier Victorian structures opposite, but the parish church of St John the Baptist , built in stages during the fifteenth century, dominates. The extraordinary flying buttresses which support the tower had to be added when it transpired that the church had been constructed upon a filled-in ditch. Its grand three-tiered south porch, the largest in England - big enough to function as the town hall at one stage - leads to the nave, where slender piers and soaring arches create a wonderful sense of space, enhanced by clerestory windows that bathe the nave in a warm light. The church contains much of interest, including a colourful wineglass pulpit , carved in stone in around 1450 and one of the few pre-Reformation pulpits to have survived in Britain. North of the chancel, superb fan vaulting hangs overhead in the chapel of St Catherine , who appears in a still vivid fragment of a fifteenth-century wall painting. In the adjacent Lady Chapel , look out for two good seventeenth-century monuments. Outside, one of the best views of the church is from the Abbey Grounds ; site of the Saxon abbey, it's now a small park skirted by the modest river Churn and a fragment of the Roman city wall. Few medieval buildings other than the church have survived in Cirencester. The houses along the town's most handsome streets - Park, Thomas and Coxwell - date mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of those on Park Street houses the Corinium Museum (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; GBP2.50), which devotes itself mainly to the Roman era. Given that the museum has one of the largest Roman collections in Britain, the number of exhibits on display is disappointing, but a lot of space is taken up by mosaic pavements , which are among the finest in the country, and the reconstructed triclinium (dining room with couches), kitchen, peristyle and butcher's shop.
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