Market Harborough to Melton Mowbray by bus

My most recent Six of the Best included an article by John Disney that says our rural bus services are in meltdown.

Judging from Market Harborough he is right. In the last couple of years we have lost a bus that served Northamptonshire villages on the way to Clipton and our service to Wilbarston, Corby and Gretton. Even the mighty 44 has been reduced in frequency.

Given that background, I have long been intrigued by the 303, which claims to run from Rothwell via Market Harborough to Melton Mowbray on the first Tuesday of every month.

Finding myself at a loose end last Tuesday - the first Tuesday in August - I had a mind to catch it.

So unlikely did the service sound that I rang Hamiltons & Buckbys Coaches the day before to make sure it was running.

They assured me it was. Where it stopped in Harborough was a slight mystery, but my mother said she had caught a bus to Melton years ago and her memory of where she had got on it coincided with my theory.

So I presented myself at the bus stop on Northampton Road shortly before 9.30. By the time the bus was due I had been joined by half a dozen old ladies and when it arrived it proved to be the mighty beast you see in the photo above.

We followed the B road through High Leicestershire from Market Harborough to Melton, taking in little-visited settlements like Three Gates and New Inn. It would have been an education to those who tell me the Midlands are flat and uninteresting - as would my ultimate destination Burrough Hill.

The 303 appears to be a purely commercial venture to take the active pensioners of Rothwell to Melton Mowbray market. I wish it well.

Market Harborough to Corby bus route under threat

The Fox Inn, Wilbarston

The 67 bus route, which runs from Market Harborough to Gretton via Corby and Rockingham, is to be withdrawn this summer after the decision by Northamptonshire County Council (NCC) to remove its subsidy.

Andrew Royle, the chairman of Gretton parish council, told the Harborough Mail:

“NCC were surprised by Centrebus’s decision to withdraw the whole of service 67 after July 23 as their understanding had been that the single vehicle operation on Monday to Friday was commercially viable, and Centrebus had given them no indication otherwise when they informed them of the likely withdrawal of their support for the service before Christmas.”

Campaigns against the decision have been set up in both Gretton and Wilbarston.

I did use this bus occasionally to get out into the countryside when there was a Saturday service, but that was withdrawn some years ago.

I wish the campaigners well in their attempts to save this route, but it is the massive cuts in central government funding for councils that are at the root of this.

A ghost at Wilbarston

When I reached Wilbarston on a sunny Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, all was peaceful.

But life was much racier there in 1957, as a British Pathe clip will show if you click on this picture...

RAF Desborough

When writing about my walk from Desborough to Pipewell and Wilbarston, I mentioned that I cut across the corner of the disused World War II airfield RAF Desborough. That airfield is worth a post of its own.

The map suggested there should be a path from the airfield down to the village of Wilbarston. Standing on the runway, it was not obvious where the path was. The best candidate was a hedge, with the blackthorn blossom showing prominently.

When I reached it, there turned out to be two hedges either side of what was obviously an ancient lane - almost a hollow way. It had obviously once been metalled and there were what looked like the remains of wartime buildings or security precautions.

Sure enough, it took me down to Wilbarston, passing beneath the village's bypass with a bridge that was almost a tunnel.

When it reached Wilbartson my lane turned out to have the name Rushton Road. This suggests it is an ancient route - Rushton is miles away, beyond the high ground and down in the Ise valley. In the Middle Ages it was one of the most important towns in Northamptonshire: today it is only a village.

This ancient road and its hedges must have been severed when the airfield was built. A reminded of the forces that were unleashed to defeat Nazi Germany.

But I also wanted to write about RAF Desborough to pass on this anecdote from the BBC site WW2 People's War, which also brings home the realities of the era:

I was at RAF Desborough driving a crash ambulance. I was on duty one night when I heard an explosion which I knew from experience was a plane crashing. I told the medical flight sergeant who contacted the control tower and they knew nothing about it. I went outside and saw a glow in the sky from the crashed plane. The M.O. then told me to go and find the plane. We drove into Desborough and nearby was an American bomb dump. The gates were all open ready for us and right at the far end of the bomb dump we found the crashed plane. It was a Wellington bomber.

Everyone on board was killed. Searching the wreckage I found an officers cap which I knew belonged to the Chief Flying Officer of the camp. Apparently he wasn’t on a mission or anything but had gone up on a “jolly”. His body wasn’t discovered for some time, until after the debris was cleared in fact.

Hi wife stayed with his coffin all night in the church, not knowing that his body wasn’t actually in the coffin. The coffin only contained sandbags to give it weight. Indeed, the sandbags were still there when the coffin was buried at his funeral later. I don’t know if the family know to this day.

Some nights later I came across the medical officer and the flight sergeant digging a hole to bury his remains on the road junction. The site of this unmarked grave still exists today. I assume that his marked grave still contains the sandbags.

From Desborough to Wilbarston via Pipewell

You left me in Desborough, exulting over another tin tabernacle.

After that I walked to Pipewell (pronounced Pipwell). I last made this journey at least 30 years ago, but I can remember planning the route to pass what used to be an ironstone quarry in the innocent hope that there might still be traces of its railway system to be seen. That quarry turned out to have become a tip full of stinking rubbish and squawking gulls.

On Saturday I could not remember exactly where that quarry had been, but I suspect it was under one of the new estates of desirable houses being built on the outskirts of Desborough. Given the depressed state of the town centre, as far as it has one, I doubt that the inhabitants will shop there.

Pipewell, some three miles away along a busy back road, was the site of a Cistercian abbey was founded in 1143. The last of the ruins disappeared in the 18th century, but the earthworks in a field beside the road and the ironstone Pipewell Hall nearby give you a good idea where it was and where some of the stone went.

The only church in Pipewell now dates from the end of the 19th century and is pictured above. It is described by a website devoted to fighting proposals for a wind farm:

Pipewell church is reputably the smallest church in the diocese of Peterborough, it was originally the old school house where the teacher had a house and one small classroom.

The house was part of the Hambrough estate and in 1880 Mrs Hambrough who resided in Pipewell hall decided she would like a church in the village and through public subscriptions £600 was raised to convert the house into a church.

The East and West wings were added to the existing building to form the shape of a cross and it was named Pipewell Abbey Church. At a later date the name was changed to its current name of Abbey church of Saint Mary.

Today it looks like a cross between a lodge house and a folly as much as it resembles a church.

I sat on the village green opposite the church and decided where to go next - reaching Pipewell had exhausted my planning. The lane north through a remnant of Rockingham Forest looked inviting, so I took it.

Although stretches of the road were unfenced, for the most part the woods were regularly protected with signs saying "Private Woods Keep Out". How Lord Bonkers' old friends the Elves of Rockingham Forest get by these days, I do not know.

(On reflection, those notices may have been aimed at a particular soldier with a bad reputation in the area.)

Eventually I reached a T junction. I turned left and, after taking in a corner of the old RAF Desborough, I found an old lane that led to Wilbarston and its pub The Fox.

The bus service between Corby and Market Harborough is something of a mystery, but one turned up to take me home exactly as promised by the timetable on the village noticeboard.