The history of Kibworth is The Story of England

Good news. The BBC is repeating Michael Wood's series The Story of England, which uses the history of the Leicestershire village of Kibworth to tell that story.

The first episode will be on the red button at 4pm tomorrow and shown on BBC4 on Wednesday at 8pm. The first episode is already available on the BBC site. I own the DVD of the series but will probably watch it on Wednesday.

Let's end with a bit of trivia.

I remember reading long ago of a Manchester Grammar School production of King Lear in which Lear was played by Robert Powell, the fool by Russell Davies and Cordelia by Michael Wood.

There is partial confirmation of this online.

St Mary in Arden, Market Harborough

Want to visit a ruined church? There is one next to Market Harborough station.

St Mary in Arden, says the Victoria County History, was first mentioned in 1220, when it was a chapel of the nearby village of Great Bowden.

That gave it the same status at St Dionysius in the centre of Harborough, and St Mary in Arden was built on the same scale and seems to have been rather more important.

In the book of his television series The Story of England, Michael Wood depicts St Mary in Arden as a place of pilgrimage:

Below the church the graveyard stretched down the hillside to the Welland, where there was an ancient sacred well known as Lady Well. The pilgrimage probably required prayers at the shrine before its image of Mary, and then bathing and drinking at the sacred well. especially for the sick and infirm, who were born along by the villagers.

The church was a ruin by the end of  the 17th century, when it was rebuilt on a more modest scale using some of the existing stones.

St Mary's churchyard remained the town's burial ground until the cemetery opened in Northampton Road in 1878.

After that the church fell into disuse. The board outside says it lost its roof in the 1950s and was almost pulled down in 1971, but is now a scheduled ancient monument and maintained by the council.

Though it prevented further deterioration, I have always found the preservation measures taken in the early 1970s unsympathetic: all that toughened glass puts me in mind of a bathroom.

Many of the gravestones were removed then too, but the best examples now surround the remains of the church. You can read about them in an article by J.C. Davies.

The church's very existence still puzzles me: why a large church just outside the town? Could it have served a lost settlement called Arden?

Those Shakespearean echoes are tempting, but maybe it was built to serve the shrine by the Welland.

And its churchyard does contain the best seat in Market Harborough.

In praise of eyesores: The Bull's Head, Tur Langton:

I seem to have reached the stage where I am revisiting local villages that I have already photographed for this blog. Today it was the turn of Tur Langton.

When I was there in 2010 the Bull's Head, though empty, still stood. You can see it in the photograph above.

It had closed around the turn of the century - a reminded that it is not so long since a village of any size could support two pubs.

Now it has gone, replaced by a chaste terrace with, I believe, some larger houses behind. The terrace is in the photo below.

But at least someone from the Markta site got inside the derelict pub before it was demolished,

The Bull's Head turns out to have an interesting history.

If you know your Michael Wood's Story of England, you will recall the Gartree, an oak tree situated to the north of the Roman Gartree Road and west of the ancient ridgeway running north to south, between Shangton and Illston-on-the-Hill.

Gartree is also one of the hundreds of Leicestershire. And, records This Was Leicestershire, it was at the tree that the hundred court met between at least 1458 and 1750.

After that, it relocated to the Bull's Head, the nearest convenient inn to the ancient meeting place.

Anyway, what I have learnt in my travels is that ever you see a building described as an 'eyesore' you should go and photograph it. It will have an interesting story and one day some well-meaning person will pull it down.