Pillowell
Pillowell is a small English village in Gloucestershire, on the south-eastern edge of the Forest of Dean. Once a mining village, much of it now lies in a conservation area.
Description
Pillowell's coordinates are 51.75° N 02.55° W. It rose to be a mining village, directly east of Whitecroft and directly west of Yorkley. Much of it lies in a conservation area. Its current population is about 250 in a housing stock of 101. The village has a place of worship: a late 19th-century Methodist chapel.Pillowell Community Primary School, founded in the 19th century, briefly became known nationally in 1973, when its pupils under their music teacher Mrs Davies, sang "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" as the signature tune for Winifred Foley's A Child of the Forest, when it was serialized on BBC Woman's Hour. The poet F. W. Harvey spent the last part of his life in the village.
History
According to the conservation-area documents, the earliest inhabitants may have been squatters on the edge of the royal Forest of Dean. In 1787, when the area still belonged to Newland parish, there were ten dwellings on Crown land, near the well that gave the settlement its name. Stronger growth came in the mid-19th century with the development of deep mining.A Primitive Methodist chapel was built in 1835, when there were around 30 cottages. The building is now in residential use. A larger chapel opened on a new site in 1885. A large school for the area opened in 1877, with places for 400 children. Average attendance was 281 in 1889 and 501 in 1901. However, the roll in 1992 was down to 61. The Swan opened as a beerhouse in the Bream Road before 1891. A Co-operative store was open by the early 20th century.
Coal mining throughout the Forest of Dean began to decline in the 1930s. The Princess Royal Colliery finally closed in 1962. A spiral brick chute and parts of a mineral railway bridge remain.