"I've been driving this route for eight months," said the bus driver, "and you're only the second person to have got off there."
Hanging Houghton is a great name for a hamlet. It stands just off the Market Harborough to Northampton road between Lamport and Brixworth, above the Brampton Valley. I once suggested Brixworth's men in black had been dealing with the downing of a flying saucer here.
When you get there you find a surprising amount of housing - old and recent. But that is all you find.
The tableau above - a pillar box, a telephone box that now houses a defibrillator and a noticeboard for Lamport and Hanging Houghton parish council in front of the former school - are all the amenities it offers now.
Hanging Houghton has not had a church for centuries, and the manor house that was built with its stone is long gone too. There is, of course, no shop, though it may have had a sub post office until recently.
This is a landscape that will surprise some: dry stone walls are a common feature on Northamptonshire's uplands.
And until the 1960s it was an industrial landscape, with an aerial ropeway and broad-gauge and narrow-gauge tramways all connected with the local ironstone quarrying industry.
At the bottom of the hill you meet the Brampton Valley Way, a footpath and cycle path that occupies the trackbed of the old Market Harborough to Northampton railway. More of that another day.
1 comment:
The fourth picture down, the row of homes. Looks very much like where I was evacuated to from London as a boy of six in 1942. The end house. I had a tiny attic room with one little window which looks like it's now been blocked off. From the second floor a tiny set of wooden step up into the attic. The people is residence was a Mrs Clark and her mother, and a tiny baby named Nell. There was a well (covered with wooden top) in the front garden. No running water. Water for the whole hamlet was drawn from a village pump in what one could call the town square. The School was no more an a hundred yards away. One teacher for all kids ranging from 5 to 15. It seconded as a church on Sundays. I think it is now a residence.
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