Through Shutterdown Spinney to Cottesbrooke

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Withcote Chapel in the Leicestershire and Rutland border-lands

Image
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...
Read more

The Road to Rutland...

Image
    ...by motorcycle I turned right off the A427, just to the east of the A6 Market Harborough bypass, picking up the B664 northeastwards, on a similar course to the River Welland.  The road then cuts out a wide bend in the river, passing straight over high ground between the spring line villages of Sutton Bassett and Weston by Welland. The high ground here is an outlier of the iron infused Jurrassic limestone, formerly quarried further east to feed the furnaces of steelworks at Corby. It is the iron that gives the rich golden hue to the stone in the cottages and churches that I passed through, village to village. These villages offer visual delights only surpassed by the beauty of the undulating landscape, as the road descends to cross the River Welland and its flood plain, to rise once more after Medbourne, only to descend once more to Stockerston, after which it crosses the Eye Brook over a narrow humpbacked bridge. Crossing the Welland I passed over the ancient bound...
Read more

Sulby Road

Image
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...
Read more