It is composed of around 175 houses, scattered around the western and eastern edge of a Cotswold spur, located approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Stroud.

[1] Stanley Park in Selsley was the destination of pioneering Oxford balloonist, James Sadler, on the first ever flight from Stroud on 19 October 1785.

[2] Selsley made the news again when the Common was the site of a Chartist rally, attended by five thousand people, on Tuesday 21 May 1839.

[4] Now the Stanley Park postal address is limited to only those dozen or so households sited within the walls and accessed via a fine listed archway entrance [5] Elsewhere in the village, architecture indicates that most of the older housing dates from the 18th and 19th century,[6] interspersed with 20th-century build.

In parts, its banks tower ten feet overhead, cloaked by hedges of hawthorn, blackthorn, ash and beech.

It runs parallel to a track continuing from Bell Lane and going past a cottage down over the brook and onto the Villiers estate in Woodchester.

Alongside the manor house lies Selsley Church, commissioned by the Marling family during the mid-19th century and modelled by Bodley in the French Gothic style.

Its stained glass was one of the first commissions undertaken by William Morris and his partners Rossetti, Webb, Ford Madox Brown and Burne-Jones.

The first recorded dispute was in the Saxon period,[8] and the threat to enclose the common in the 19th century met with vocal public outrage.

Dotted over the common are the long abandoned remains of quarries once used to supply stone for local building and walling.

Selsley Common (grid reference SO829030) is a 39.4-hectare (97-acre) biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Gloucestershire, notified in 1966.