I did not feel up to travelling on Saturday, but I wanted to take some photographs. So I explored Market Harborough.
Well, Little Bowden actually - a village that was long ago absorbed by the town. The same thing is in the process of happening to Great Bowden today.
One quirky fact about Little Bowden is that it used to be in Nortbamptonshire.
The border between Northants and Leicestershire used to be the Welland, but by the 1890s there had been enough new building south of the river to annoy the tidy minded.
You can still see, in Northampton Road, what used to be the police station and magistrates court for the part of Market Harborough that was in Northants.
So the border between the counties was moved a mile or two to the south, so the whole of Market Harborough and Little Bowden, my house with them, now lay in Leicestershire.
The same act got rid off the enclaves of one county that were to be found surrounded by another across England. A Wikipedia article on Worcestershire shows just how complicated the picture could be.
Anyway, this is how Little Bowden looks today - not forgetting our new footbridge and a local cat.
2 comments:
On Saturday I'll be visiting family who live in Little Bowden. It's a fine place, regardless of county.
Fun fact: the Warwickshire county cricket ground at Edgbaston stands on land that, until 1911, was part of Worcestershire (as was much of South Birmingham).
Flintshire too had a small island of Flint surrounded by anther county. Odder to was the fact that up to the coming of more rational 20th century times the old Woolwich Council in SE London also held jurisdiction over the dockside settlement of North Woolwich across the wide and fast flowing River Thames
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