Following The Story Of England

Another day, another bagged breakfast, quickly followed by a brief detour into Diseworth and the heritage centre to pick up the books I had arranged to buy and for which the staff had kindly agreed to open the place for me to get them.

Then it was on to the order of the day. Helen and I had watched the re-run of Michael Wood’s documentary (of his book) The Story Of England, which had focused around the three villages of Kibworth Harcourt, Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton Westerby. We were now interested to see some of the places shown in person.

This involved a drive down the M1 and then, with tightly wound up windows, through the lurg ridden extended lockdown area of Leicester (and Oadby). We headed to the old Roman Gartree Road, where we could follow it to the south east (apart from a detour through Burton Overy where the road turns in to a path) to find the Gartree. Not the original one, but the replanted one.

A long fruitless search followed, despite having a picture of it and a description of where it should stand and an OS map, we spent nearly an hour going up and down the Gartree Road, trying to find any oak tree or a sign of where there were telegraph wires (as in the back of the picture) before giving it up as a bad job and heading into Kibworth Harcourt, across the A6, over the railway and finding somewhere to park in Kibworth Beauchamp.

From there we walked through both villages following the trails shown on various information boards up around the villages. The church of St Wilfred’s was another mainly built in ironstone and lines of slate headstones. There are plenty of seventeenth and eighteenth century buildings and it is where we first really come to realise that the manor houses in the county were all three story affairs, something that isn’t the case in villages in Sussex where we live now.

The other thing that we noticed was that the old nucleuses of the villages were very much still the original buildings, and that newer builds tended to be added on as the villages expanded instead of being crammed in amongst the original buildings. There appears to be less old building torn down to make way for new builds.

After following the two village trails we went back up to the Coach & Horses for lunch, one of the places in the series where they dug a pit to look for remnants from past years. A lovely old place with low beams (dangerous to me, but fine for Helen), and an old map on the wall that was a bit too big to try and sneak out.

It was then time to move on to the last of the three villages – Smeeton Westerby. There is another trail laid out here, and we followed it out to the edge of the village where Christ Church sits, before heading back across fields to the centre of the village.

Next stop was Foxton Locks. We parked at the top car park and headed over the turning bridge and along the path to the top lock. A longboat was just entering the top lock having made the long slow laborious journey up through the full set of ten locks, one of several who were making that journey as we walked down the locks and past the closed visitor centre and over to the inclined plane.

It was starting to rain again as we approached the bottom so we took refuge in the Foxton Locks Inn at the bottom for a drink as the shower passed over. Then it was the walk back up the other side of the locks, where all the traffic had cleared and no one was attempting the steps, though there were certainly more boats moored along the tow path than when we had gone down.

We carried on, heading past Gartree prison and into Great Bowden for the first of a tale of three churches – St Andrews. The original parish church when Great Bowden was the centre of the parish before Market Harborough even existed. From there it was down through Little Bowden and across to St Mary in Arden which had been granted the licence for burials for the village and Market Harborough. The church is ruined now, with no roof, doors or windows. The large graveyard is still laid out, but all the headstones have been moved into tightly packed rows surrounding the church building, with just a couple of memorial tombs out in the graveyard.

From here it was a short walk into the centre of Market Harborough. We walked up Adam and Eve Street past the museum and council buildings and into the square containing St Dionysius’ church and the old Grammar School. If you were asked what is unusual about the church you may struggle for an answer, but when you are told it becomes obvious. There is no church/grave yard surrounding it, just street. This comes from the fact that Market Harborough came into being rather late from a historical perspective and that the church was only built as a chapel to St Mary in Arden, and therefore burials would take place there instead of the newer, bigger church of St Dionysius. It is most unusual for a church of this age in a town of this size.

A wander up the High Street shows a very similar lay out and selection of buildings to the one in Ashby de la Zouch that we visited the previous year. The Grammar School is very interesting as a stilted Tudor building, to which the brick ground level wasn’t added until some two hundred years after the upper level. I just stand there wondering how people got into the Grammar School before the ground level was built.

After a brief wander around the rest of the town centre it was time to head back to the car, get some fuel, and head back to the hotel. We ordered a curry for takeaway from Kegworth, and set off, going across country along the A4304 to Lutterworth where we got on the M1 to head north.

The curry was good, and there was enough to spread it out to cover tomorrow’s dinner as well.

For this blog post with pictures click on the link below

https://medium.com/@onetruekev/follow-the-story-of-england-9446b6aa0d2b

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