History UsefulNotes / TheWestCountry

* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' specifies that Arthur's house looks out over stretches of West Country farmland, before first the house, and then the West Country itself, are demolished.

* Series/BeyondParadise2023: Set in the fictional Devonshire town of Shipton Abbot, but filmed in the very real town of Looe, which is just over the border in UsefulNotes/{{Cornwall}}

* Robert Hardy, who played Siegfried in Series/AllCreaturesGreatAndSmall, was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

* Myth/KingArthur. He was a mythical Romano-British war leader (later described as a king) who may have come from Cornwall, given that he was half-Cornish on his mother's side and according to [[Literature/HistoriaRegumBritanniae Geoffrey of Monmouth]] his story beings at Tintagel Castle, where Uther secretly bedded the Lady Igraine to conceive him.
** Glastonbury in Somerset also tries to lay some claim to the Arthurian legends. Locals like to believe that it is the Isle of Avalon as mentioned in the stories, and the monks of the Abbey claimed that they had found grave of Arthur and Guinevere 1194.

[[quoteright:254:[[http://www.b3ta.com/challenge/britishamerica/page10 https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/once_upon_a_time_in_the_west_country_3275.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:254:Yeah, it's [[BlatantLies kinda like]] [[Film/OnceUponATimeInTheWest that]].]]

Gloucestershire has the Cotswolds running through it, and the villages, especially to the north of the county, have lots of picture perfect sandy coloured limestone cottages. Gloucestershire was also an important area in Roman times, and the town of Cirencester, or Corinium, as it was known at the time, was the second most important city in Roman Britain. To the west of the country, on the border with Wales, is the Forest of Dean, a former royal hunting Forest, who’s locals have a dialect only known to them and bit of an reputation with the rest of the county, possibly due to it being one of the most undeveloped parts of the county but one area called Puzzlewood was used for filming Film/StarWars and Series/Merlin2008. Wedged between these two parts is the River Severn, which almost splits the county in half, in an area known as the Severn Vale. Famous for the Severn Bore, a natural tidal wave phenomenon where too much water tries to get through too narrow a channel (Gloucestershire is where the river starts to widen out into the Severn Estuary, that then leads to the Bristol Channel, which, incidentally, used to be called the Severn Sea.) comes up through the river twice a month (Usually a couple of days after a new and full moon) and attracts people to try and surf it, until it peters out somewhere north of Gloucester. Due to the Severn having the second highest tidal range in the world, Gloucestershire is bizarrely classed as a coastal county by UsefulNotes/TheEuropeanUnion, despite the fact that the only beach in the county is a man made one on a lake by Cirencester, which is a good twenty miles inland, and the Severn should definitely never be attempted to swam in that section due to it's dangerous tides and quick sand. Like Bristol, the city of Gloucester is also associated with the aerospace industry, as the Gloster[[note]]So foreigners could easily spell it[[/note]] Aircraft company producing the [[CoolPlane Hurricane, Typhoon, and pioneering jet-powered Meteor]].

* Creator/JKRowling, author of ''Literature/HarryPotter'', was born in Chipping Sodbury.[[note]]Incidentally, Chipping Sodbury is also about 10 miles south of another small town who’s name appears in Literature/HarryPotter a lot: Dursley, which is in Gloucestershire.[[/note]], a small town just north of Bristol, and grew up in nearby Tutshill, Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Forest of Dean. However, the series was conceived in [[UsefulNotes/{{Scotland}} Edinburgh.]]

* Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, the ski jumper who represented Great Britain in the 1988 Winter Olympics was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and still lives in the local area, where he works as a Lawyer.

* Series/BeyondParadise2022: Set in the fictional Devonshire town of Shipton Abbot, but filmed in the very real town of Looe, which is just over the border in UsefulNotes/{{Cornwall}}

[[caption-width-right:252:Yeah, it's [[BlatantLies kinda like]] [[Film/OnceUponATimeInTheWest that]].]]

* Brian Jones, one of the founding members of Music/TheRollingStones, was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

* Edward III was murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestrshire, and is buried at Gloucester Cathedral.