Wheels from Ivy Cottage

The Grange, Cottesbrooke I cycled down Haslebach Hill, through the shade of Shutterdown Spinney, to the village of Cottesbrooke. After passing the entrance to Cottesbrooke Hall, I pulled up to look at The Grange, a substantial, elongated manor house, with impressive chimneys. I turned to look behind me and chanced upon a delightful view of thatched cottages, nestled amongst trees by the roadside. Riding back through the village and beyond, I turned left, passing through a gate to follow a lane through a wide open field grazed by sheep. The ridge and furrow were extensive, bearing the imprint of their medieval creators, much as they were before the sheep were introduced to replace the strip field peasantry. The open nature of the large field gave just a flavour of what the treeless landscape of strip farming must have been like before enclosure changed communities and landscapes forever. Passing through another gate, I cycled on to join the undulating road to Naseby.  © John Dunn. ...

      Carpet bagger at Harrington       I cycled up the rise to Kelmarsh, through a chorus of birdsong, after a shower of warm summer rain, passing the church at the summit to my right. Crossing the main road, I passed estate cottages to my left. A plaque recorded a project at the height of World War Two to rehouse people rendered homeless by a domestic fire which got out of control during a strong wind. THESE 10 COTTAGES WERE REBUILT IN 1948 BY COL. C. G. LANCASTER MP  ON THE SITE OF 13 ELIZABETHAN  COTTAGES DESTROYED BY FIRE ON  4TH MAY 1943. There are undulations and ground workings in the fields at the top of the rise after Kelmarsh, unmentioned on the OS map. Was there quarrying for stone in the past, perhaps providing building materials for Kelmarsh Hall, the church, or estate workers’ cottages? Or were they something to do with the tunnelling work for the now disused railway up ahead. An avenue of trees leaves those earth workings and...

  Cycling along the quiet lane from Clipston to Sibbertoft, I was drawn to a halt by my curiosity when I saw an information board, erected in a field just before Lowes Farm. I was surprised to see that it had been erected by the Woodlands Trust; surprised because there is no woodland in the immediate area. Nevertheless, The Woodlands Trust informed me that in the field beyond were the remains of a medieval settlement called Nobold (a name supposedly derived over time from New Build), remains which lie underground. An agricultural community once scratched out a living here, before the place was abandoned in the 14th century. It had already been abandoned 200 years previously when the Royalist Army commanded by Charles I and Prince Rupert tramped past here, on their way to meet their fate on the battlefield of nearby Naseby in 1645. And it was after passing through Naseby that I cycle down the quiet, narrow and delightfully rural lane to Thornby, a village straddling the old turnpike...

Water tower, Gumley Cycling up the hill through the pretty village of Gumley, I was struck by the sight of an Italianate campanile type tower at the top of the hill. It vies for attention with the steeple of the nearby church and wins easily. Later research revealed this to be a highly embellished water tower set above the stables to Gumley Hall (demolished in 1964). The tower held water for the horses stabled below. I took the lane towards Saddington, which passes over a ridge of 540 feet at the trig point by the lane-side, just above Holloway Spinney. I pulled up at a laneside gateway on the steep descent from the ridge alongside Holloway Spinney, and contemplated how the field full of very pronounced ridge and furrow across the lane, now full of sheep, would once have been full of hardworking peasants cultivating their individual strips of land in vast open fields, before enclosure, hedgerows and sheep revolutionised the landscape laid out before me. The field stood out from the oth...

Experimental Archaeology at the Viking ship museum in Roskilde. The Saxon river boats would have been much smaller, but similar principles apply I cycled southwards, along Sulby Road. An ancient Road, which centuries ago was chosen as the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, taking up the role temporarily abandoned by the rivers Welland and Avon. Sulby Road in fact crosses the watershed between the two. At the time of the embryonic Saxon shires, or shares of land, the Midlands were an area of dense and near-impenetrable woodland. Boat travel along rivers was the principal and often only means of transport across country. Travel West-East at this point would have meant hauling a boat out of the Avon and dragging it on sleds and rollers over the watershed and into the Welland. Sulby Road, then a track in the woodland, may have witnessed the tortuously slow progress of such boat-haulings. Did Offa and the other Mercian kings pass this way as they traversed their Sa...

I rode across a landscape in need of a collective name, rich in rolling hills, pasture, small streams, woods and ponds. I’ll call it the border-land between Leicestershire and Rutland for now. I motorcycled on the Leicestershire side through Hallaton, passing close by the church, village green and the strange conical structure topped with a cross, known as the Butter Cross, which stands where a market was once held.   I left the village from its north side, riding on to pass through East Norton and Loddington. The wind was from the south, making this an unseasonably warm day, occasionally bright and sunny day. Following days of rain, the roads were treacherous where tall hedges and tree cover left roads damp and slippery with the help of Autumn leaves. This inevitably induced slow riding to keep the bike as upright as possible where tyre grip was low. Over a cattle grid and into the wide open acres of Launde Abbey, once an Augustinian Priory, then Tudor Manor House, and now home to...