Wheels from Ivy Cottage

In the distance, glimpses of the beautiful spire of Queniborough’s church, considered by Pevsner to be "one of the finest spires in the whole of Leicestershire”. It’s certainly the tallest. Over the Queniborough Brook, and beyond that, Queniborough’s high street, a designated conservation area; and three cheers for that, given the rich mix of 16th to 20th-century properties - the classic brick cottages, painted facades, and thatched rooves. A joy to ride through. The target of my ride has brought me along this lovely High Street; a ride to an ancient remnant of the pre-conquest Saxon kingdom of Mercia, located in Rothley, north of Leicester. Even on the more recently built edges of Queniborough there’s history to be found. A short stretch of road beyond the High Street stops at a T junction. This is where I join an old turnpike established in 1764, connecting Melton Mowbray and Leicester. It later became the A607, until bypassed in 1992. Having turned right at that T, I am now hea...

  It took a low gear to keep me cycling up the hill out of Cottesbrooke towards Creaton. At the summit the view up ahead to my left drew me to a lane-side pause. What caught my eye first was the curving, swooping edge to a defined swathe of woodland at the opposite side of the shallow valley formed, over centuries, by a narrow tributary of the River Nene. Creaton Covert, the name of the wood tells of the reason for its planting about one hundred and fifty years ago, possibly more, which was to nurture the population of foxes hereabouts. For the countryside I surveyed before me has long been hunting territory, and has been shaped by the sport. The hill I had climbed gave me sweeping views to the horizon where, beyond the bounded wood, I could make out the spire of the great Saxon church of Brixworth, in its day the greatest building north of the Alps, dignifying the hilltop stronghold of the Mercian kings. Almost monochrome, the colours laid out before me were predominantly deep gre...

Oh how it raineth every day in this year’s month of February. In a mood of self-mockery for trusting my fate to the various weather forecasts, I found myself, nose to pane, staring through sliding globules at the drenched driveway. The forecasts pronounced confidently rain, but for now it was easing off to a still-visible, but fine drizzle. This was my free day of the week. I’ll chance it I thought. On with the gear. To my bicycle, waiting and pre-prepared the day before, I was off into the gloom. But immediately I felt the relief of an escapee, free from confinement and celebrated my decision to get out. If I don’t cycle on days like this in February, I thought, I’ll never get out. Nothing from now on could spoil the admixture of self-congratulatory delight and the joy from my lifting my face into the breeze as I turned to confront the east wind, nothing could quell the elation, not even the road closures that scuttled my plan to cycle into the wind for the first half of the ride, to...

This had been the day of the ‘water-music’, the music of the field drains, the splash of tyres though puddles and temporary fords, the rush of the swollen Welland. I cycled in the overhanging gloom of last night’s hurtling darkness, as the biting east wind continued its troubled buffeting into this half-day. I cycled up the north side of the Welland Valley, turning off to Gumley before reaching Foxton. Crossing over the canal bridge, I could glance to the right to glimpse the top of the famous flight of locks. I passed through Gumley, once a centre of Mercian power, where historical matters of church and the Saxon kingdom were debated and passed into charters and law. Some contend that the great King Offa lies buried here, and that his hilltop sanctuary high above the wet and once forested claylands below may have provided the model for the Norman French rendition of the Arthurian legends, this place being Camelot, this thin place where old crosses into new and reality into legend. But...

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...

    ...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...