Following the fortunes of the Seven Springs, you naturally enter with some degree of zeal into an expedition down the River Churn, and this you are able to do without losing sight of the excellent road between Cheltenham and Cirencester. The pretty little dancing trout stream runs hard by the highway, mostly through a succession of beautiful estates, and generally thickly overhung with alders and other bushes. Drayton hit off the character of the stream most accurately in calling it the "nimble-footed Churn;" and its picturesqueness, and musical flow between the wooded hills and through the fat meadows, as we near Cirencester, appeal to us, even on the score of sentiment. Surely it is more pleasant to identify this as the Thames than that commonplace current proceeding from the Thames Head series of springs. There is no necessity, however, to trace in detail the course of the beck-like Churn, by wooded uplands teeming with game, and through rustic villages and sequestered grounds. It runs through Rendcombe to North Cerney, down by Baunton, and through the once famous and still interesting town of Cirencester. The Fosse-way mentioned in connection with Thames Head was one of three great Roman roads which met here. Mentioned by Roman historians as Corinium and Cornovium, the strongly fortified city of Cirencester, the metropolis of a Roman province was, there is reason for believing, a considerable British town before it became a Roman centre. In the time of Henry VIII. the Roman wall surrounding the city might yet be traced, and, as the histories of Gloucestershire show, many Roman remains have from time to time been discovered here. The Churn sustains its brook-like character alongside the Cricklade road by Addington, South Cerney, and Hailstone Hill, and then within a mile of the town of Cricklade it unites with the other branch issuing from Thames Head, to which it is necessary briefly to return, in order to administer to it the justice already bestowed upon what we have agreed to regard as the rightful heir, namely, the Seven Springs stream, or River Churn.