Finedon was once one of Northamptonshire's four largest towns

At the time of the Domesday Book the four largest settlement in Northamptonshire were Northampton, Brackley, Rushton and Finedon. The first two are still towns (one a great deal larger than the other) and Rushton is now a small village near Desborough

Finedon, where I went today, is described as a town, though its population at the 2021 census was only 4552 and there are few shops left in its historic heart.

The pub proved to be closed until six – as it was a Friday, that suggests to me that it's more of a restaurant these days – and the cafe that was my fallback had the builders in. 

I was saved by a small Co-op branch, were I got a sandwich. Looking round for the refrigerated unit with the cans of pop, I found it had a whole cold room devoted to them. How neat is that? The owner offered to let me stay in there for a while to cool off, but it wasn't that hot outside.

Anyway, Finedon's many ironstone buildings – there were many quarries serving the steel industry here at one time – remain and here are some of them.

Later. In fact, as someone pointed out on Bluesky, the pub I mentioned (The Bell Inn) closed in January. I'd assumed there would be some more pubs on the very busy A6 – as seems common in Northamptonshire, the original centre of Finedon lies off the later main road – but there are none.

Finedon may soon resemble the Leicestershire village of Hallaton, which once tried to rival Market Harborough as a market town. It has what still feels like a high street, but there are no shops on it.

Oh, and the Finedon building in the photograph immediately below this text used to be a hotel.

Medbourne station and the emptiness of the countryside between Leicester and Peterborough

I went to look for Medbourne station, which closed as long ago as 1916. You may remember that I blogged about a 1922 campaign to reopen it.

The station master's house survives, but you can't get a good photo of it from the public road. You can see a picture of it on the Medbourne village website.

So all I can show you is the pillars at the entrance to the station, which are quite a way from where the platforms would have been. The second pillar is next to the litter bin, if you're struggling to locate it.

And below is a heavily altered (Notswoldised?) terrace of railwaymen's cottages, which stands close to the station entrance.

In 1910 the Great Northern Railway ran a service from Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough North (the present-day Peterborough station), which called at Medbourne. It probably took a more direct route than the Leicester to Peterborough trains via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford do today.

What brings home the emptiness of this part of the world is the list of stations the GNR trains called at between Leicester and Peterborough. After the Leicester suburb of Humberstone, there was not a place of even middling size among them.

The list ran: Humberstone, Thurnby & Scraptoft, Ingarsby, Lowesby, Tilton, East Norton, Hallaton, Medbourne, Rockingham, Seaton, Wakerley & Barrowden, King's Cliffe, Nassington, Wansford, Castor.

A journey along the disused Market Harborough to Newark railway

It was building the Great Northern and London & North Western Railway (GN&LNWJR) that brought my hero J.W. Logan MP to the Market Harborough area. You can see, from the sturdy bridges that remain to this day, that Logan & Hemingway knew how to build railways,

Borders and Beeching traces the disused line from Welham Junction, just north of Market Harborough, to Newark, though the stretch through Melton Mowbray is missed out.

As Eastern Leicestershire is not heavily populated, the GN&LNWJR was always more of a freight line, serving many local ironstone quarries and also bringing coal from the East Midlands to London via Market Harborough and Northampton. There were coal concentration sidings at Welham. 

Despite what the caption suggests, Medbourne station was not on this line but on a short curve that joined it to the line to Stamford. And when I used our new on-demand bus service to get to Hallaton recently, it set me down and picked me up from the old station site, even though it's a little way out of the village, as though it were meeting a train.

Passenger services officially ended in 1953, but unadvertised trains ran until 1957 and the GN&LNWJR branch to Leicester Belgrave Road saw holiday trains to Skegness as late as 1962.

Goods services ended in 1964, but odd fragments of the line continued to see workings for some years after that. It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the GN&LNWJR to get a clear picture of the life and death of this interesting line.

And there's more border collie content in a recent post on this blog.

The Joy of Six 1355

"It needs to restore its reputation for economic credibility, which means that it cannot deny the damage done by Brexit – and support measures to mitigate that damage by moving closer to the EU.  It should be willing to be very critical of Donald Trump.  And it needs to wholeheartedly make the case against Reform and Farage not on tactical grounds - 'vote Reform, get Labour' - but because it is a very bad idea to get Reform at all." David Gauke charts a path to recovery for the Conservatives, but doubts they will take it.

Simon Fletcher fears Keir Starmer's rightward shift is laying the ground for Nigel Farage: "It is the Government’s current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness. The repeated lesson of Labour governments - and indeed left of centre governments around the world - is that voters expect them to improve their living standards and when they do not, they withdraw their support."

James Hawes argues that we should not be surprised that AfD polls so well in eastern Germany. For reasons rooted in history, voters there have chosen authoritarian parties ever since they got the vote.

"As a chartered psychologist, I decided to read Spare to learn more about a topic that deeply interests me; the adverse childhood experiences of children from materially privileged homes. This topic is thoroughly addressed within the text. However, I didn’t predict that I would be left with such an aching sadness for Harry, his brother and his mother and to some extent his father; normal, flawed human beings trapped and tormented within a crumbling, cruelly dysfunctional gilded cage." Pam Jarvis reads Prince Harry's book.

Simon Matthews watches Ridley Scott's The Duellists from 1977.

"The helmet was made of iron covered with silver and gilt, consistent with early Imperial Roman cavalry helmet types found on the Continent. Over 1000 coins in the same pit provide a mid-1st century date, suggesting that the helmet was buried at the same time as the coins in the entranceway. The reason why the helmet was buried within a British shrine remains uncertain – it may have belonged to a Briton serving in the Roman army, or was possibly a diplomatic gift." The Hallaton Fieldwork Group on the discovery of an Iron Age shrine outside this Leicestershire village.

Hallaton Castle filmed from the air

Back to Hallaton. Historic England describes Hallaton Castls as "the finest example of its type in Leicestershire," that type being a Norman motte and bailey castle.

Chris Tweed took this drone footage of the castle in 2023, and the Gatehouse website says of it:

Unusually 600m from church and most probably a new site. The chosen site has some defensive features but is overlooked to the west. Built not on the top of a rise, but on a false crest to be as visible from the old Leicester Way as possible. 

If this has been a purely defensive structure it would have been built on the true crest, where the defenders would still have full visibility but the interior of the bailey would be hidden from observation (allowing the size of a garrison to be kept secret). Its actual location shows the castle off to the fullest as a display of wealth and status.

Hallaton: A Leicestershire village that was once a town

Hallaton is only a village, but it once had markets and the status of a town. I suppose in the end it could not compete with the medieval economic behemoth that was Market Harborough.

And it has a High Street (not a Main Street like most Leicestershire villages), which retains a distinctly urban feel. The sad thing is that today it does not have a single shop on it.

Still, look on the bright side: Hallaton still has a castle, a recently discovered medieval chapel that was devoted to an obscure saint who had a cult here, was the scene of the discovery of an Iron Age horde, a museum, a conical market cross and is the site every Easter Monday of a traditional bottle kicking match (a form of folk football) and hare pie scrambling - more details of most of these on the Council for British Archaeology site.

If the incomers of The Notswolds are to perish in a folk-horror reckoning, it may well be here. Meanwhile, these are some pictures of the village I took yesterday.

Hallaton Museum is housed in a tin tabernacle

I went to Hallaton today and found a tin tabernacle. It houses Hallaton Museum, which will be open in the afternoon at weekends and bank holidays from 21 April to 6 October.

This tin tabernacle was purchased in 1894 by the new rector of Hallaton, Canon Chetwynd-Stapylton, to serve the village for recreation and as a reading-room.

An unidentified local history book tells us:

His generous gesture failed to secure him a seat on Hallaton Parish Council and he subsequently recorded his disappointment in the Parish Magazine:

"I thought that I have established a fair claim to be accounted a good citizen of Hallaton. I have stood entirely alone in the erection of a Parish Room, at considerable cost, in furnishing, heating and lighting it and supplying it with newspapers, etc. as a reading room for two winters…"

Never mind, Canon Chetwynd-Stapylton, you had a great name.

The Hallaton Helmet is on display at the Harborough Museum

I went into the Harborough Museum today to see the Hallaton Helmet.

BBC News explains:

A "bling" Roman helmet found in a Leicestershire field offers a tantalising glimpse into a world in flux, experts have said.

The artefact, lavishly decorated with silver and gold, was uncovered in 2000, along with 5,000 coins, near the village of Hallaton.

It has gone on display in Market Harborough with previously unseen artefacts after further study revealed new insights into its decoration, construction, and historical period it was made in.

The helmet has been dated to the mid 1st Century AD, a crucial time for Britain as this saw the full-scale invasion of the island by four Roman legions in 43AD.

When it was first discovered, a popular explanation for the finding of the helmet at Hallaton was that it had been presented to a British chieftain who had fought for Rome on mainland Europe as a mercenary. 

But when I went to an archaeology conference at the University of Leicester last year, I found that one had slipped down the league table of theories.

Christopher Brasher goes to the Hallaton bottle kicking

Click on the image above to go to the BBC Rewind website and see a 1964 report by a bemused Christopher Brasher on the Hallaton bottle kicking.

This is in essence one of those football games between villages that claim medieval roots and are the ancestors of modern football and rugby. Wikipedia calls these contests 'folk football', which I rather like.

Brasher, incidentally, interviews Jack Stamp, founder of Market Harborough's most celebrated undertakers.

Read more about bottle kicking on the Medbourne Village website.

A Leicestershire circular pilgrimage: St Morrell’s Round

The British Pilgrimage Trust has a page on St Morrell’s Round - an 18-mile circular route within Leicestershire.

The round is inspired by the medieval pilgrimages made to St Morrell’s Chapel on the hillside near Hallaton. Morrell, who died in 453AD, was Bishop of Anger in North-West France. He went into self-imposed exile overseas before returning to be beatified for performing the miracle of Renatus, which is shown on a mural in Anger cathedral. 

Some 800 years later a Norman overlord built a chapel in Hallaton and dedicated it to St Morrell. This is the only church in Britain mentioning Morrell and so it might have been believed that Morrell’s exile was in Hallaton. 

We know that it was a pilgrimage destination for at least the next three hundred years. The chapel was rediscovered in 2014 and work is being carried out to restore the crypt of St Michael’s Church, Hallaton, so the remains found in the chapel can be reinterred there.

The pilgrimage starts and finishes at the museum on Churchgate in Hallaton, which is next to St Michael’s church where there is evidence of an external pulpit built to address gathered pilgrims. The route leaves Hallaton on a medieval road passing its motte and bailey castle before visiting four more rural churches built from the local ironstone, all of which were open during the time when the medieval pilgrims were passing. 

Of note is St Michael’s, Loddington, which was left isolated when the whole village was rebuilt a short distance away after the plague. The far point of the route is Launde Abbey, originally built in 1099 as an Augustine Priory and later taken by Thomas Cromwell. 

As the route crosses the ridges of high Leicestershire it passes fragments of ancient woodland - including the Launde Big Wood, which is conserved and shows exactly the kind of woodland that pilgrims walked through on their way to Hallaton.

A tour of Pre-Roman Leicester and Leicestershire

In the second of his Hidden Histories videos Jim Butler shows us that Leicester was an important town - a tribal capital and cultural hub - long before a the Romans conquered Britain,

He explores Iron Age Leicester and the surrounding county to understand why it was such an important target for the Roman invaders.

Six of the Best 918

James Baillie government threats to ban outdoor exercise are dangerous and show the Liberal Democrats their mission.

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán now rules by decree in a troubling example of how coronavirus fear enables authoritarians to tighten their grip, says Umut Korkut.

"Visitors had to collect a wooden ladder and climb up it and talk through the glass of a closed window. All gifts had to be handed to the nurses, who then went through them to decide whether they were suitable." Recalling his mother's childhood experiences in a fever hospital, Stephen Colegrave reminds us that social distancing used to be commonplace.

"Rising Damp captured the seedy feel of the 70s and the rise of the slum landlord, and mixed it with the cultural impact of women’s liberation, immigration and working class aspiration." Anna Cale celebrates the situation comedies of Eric Chappell.

"Just outside the village of Hallaton in southeast Leicestershire, over 5,000 gold and silver coins were unearthed, along with a silver-gilt 1st century Roman cavalry helmet, various items of jewellery and fragments of pottery." Ellen Huxley on the Hallaton Treasure, now to be found in the Harborough Museum.

Jonathan Wallace know the goats of Llandudno.

Hallaton Castle: Where J.W. Logan's men tried archaeology

Embed from Getty Images

Hallaton is a picturesque village a few miles north east of Market Harborough that also has its pagan side. I mean to visit it again one day and take some photographs.

I recently came across this fine photograph of its Norman castle, which has been described as "one of the best examples of a motte and bailey castle in Leicestershire".

That Hallaton Castle Hill Camp page tells a story of interest to this blog:

In the summer of 1877 railway engineers 'excavated' the site. They sank 2 shafts into the mound. 'Natural' was 17'6" down. Then a layer of peat and trees and bog earth, including 'heath and hazel, broom and furze, birch and oak', some with axe marks. In this were 'numerous splinters of bone', also pottery, leather shoes, a shoe-lace, charred wood and burnt stones. 

Above this were layers of clay, gravel and boulders with very abundant remains of wood fires together with burnt and blackened fragments of pots and also burnt and splintered bones. Also layers of ashy refuse up to 4" thick with iron objects, one gilded, bits of shoes, wooden bowls, a wooden shovel, squared stakes, a portion of ladder (?), 2 fragments of Roman pottery and large quantities of pottery, some crude 'British' through to salt glaze. 

The last 10-12 feet were clean, somewhat gravely yellow clay with many bones, and large pebbles and boulders. On top was a hard chalky stratum 15" thick. In the bailey 'numerous holes were sunk' and 'the abundance of melted iron ore, which with dross and charcoal and refuse showed plainly that it had been worked and wrought in situ'. 'Burnt red stones… surrounded by charcoal' were noted. 

Horse-shoes, buckles, rude ware, pipestones etc of last 200-300 years were noted. It was thought that it might have been used as a garden.

Those navvies must have been employed by the firm of Logan & Hemingway, which built the Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway through Hallaton.

That is Logan as in this blog's hero J.W. Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough 1891-1904 and 1910-16.
It was the contract to build this line that first brought him to Leicestershire.

Hallaton bottle kicking 2018

Highlights from Easter Monday's contest, in which Hallaton beat Medbourne 2-0.

Hallaton Bottle Kicking 2017

Embed from Getty Images

A slideshow of this ancient Leicestershire custom courtesy of Getty Images.

A radio play on the dark side of Leicestershire village life

Photo of Hallaton © Colin Smith

These is a dramatised ghost story on the BBC iPlayer at the moment called The Parson.

What interested me at once is that it is clearly based on the traditional bottle-kicking and hare-pie scrambling that takes place in the Leicestershire village of Hallaton every Easter Monday.

Sure enough, the dramatist David Varela confirms that the play was:

inspired by the ancient pagan tradition of Bottlekicking in my parents’ home village of Hallaton. The reality is pretty horrific, so turning it into a horror story was easy.

I have not heard the end of it yet, but I do not fancy the chances of the meddling new vicar.

The Hallaton bottle-kicking: How we spend Easter Monday in Leicestershire

Read more about bottle-kicking.

The skeletons found holding hands

Hallaton © Graham Horn

Today's newspapers loved the story of the two skeletons that were found holding hands. But even more interesting is the place that they were found.

The University of Leicester Archaeological Services website explains:

ULAS archaeologists have been working with local volunteers to uncover the lost chapel of St Morrell overlooking the small village of Hallaton in east Leicestershire. The Fourth year of excavations with the Hallaton Fieldwork Group (HFWG) has revealed the full plan of the chapel as well as the cemetery and evidence that the hillside has been used since at least the Roman period. 

The location of the chapel was unknown before research by local historian John Morison suggested it might be on Hare Pie Bank where the annual Easter Hare Pie Scramble and Bottle Kicking take place. Geophysical survey by HFWG showed a square boundary (approximately 36m across) with features inside it. Subsequent excavations by ULAS and the group have uncovered the chapel thought to be a place of pilgrimage in the medieval period and a pilgrim badge with ‘Morrell’ inscribed on it was found within the walls of the chapel. 

The excavations have identified the walls and tiled floor of the chapel as wells as fragments of stone masonry, wall plaster, tiles and lead from the windows. A number of silver pennies dating between the 12th – 16th centuries have also been found on the site indicating when the chapel was in use.

And Dr Graham Jones will tell you all about St Morrell. His seems to have been a local cult, and he is not marked anywhere beyond Hallaton:

The name in English is derived from French and means 'small, shrivelled dark thing' - compare the name of the Morello cherry. Queen Elizabeth I of England was known (not entirely pejoratively, perhaps) as 'a little morrella'. Because of the name's unusual flavour in the context of an English local church, the conjecture has been canvassed that it is a corruption of some Old English name such as Merewalh. This was a name borne by a Mercian sub-king on the Welsh marches of England. These lie in the far west Midlands rather than the east, but Merewalh was a benefactor of an east Midlands saint, Botolph of Icanho (what later became Boston), and several of his relatives were commemorated in Leicestershire and its neighbouring counties. 

However, a much more plausible explanation, and one with evidential support, is that Morrell, 'Mawrell' in 1532, represents St Maurilius of Angers, a fifth-century bishop and patron of that French town, whose legend purported that he sought exile in England where he worked as a gardener for an English noble. The families of Norman lords of Hallaton originated in that region of France. Also, land in Leicestershire and neighbouring Warwickshire was given in the eleventh century to the monastery of St Nicholas of Angers.

Tony Ray-Jones at Hallaton in 1967

#90761595 / gettyimages.com

You have two more days to visit the photographic exhibition Only in England at the National Media Museum in Bradford, though it will tour the country after it closes there. It has already been staged at the Science Museum in London.

The write up on the Bradford museum's website explains its appeal:

'Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr' examines the close relationship between the work of these two important photographers and their fascination with the English. 

Intrigued by the eccentricities of English social customs, Tony Ray-Jones spent the latter half of the 1960s travelling across England, photographing what he saw as a disappearing way of life. 

Humorous yet melancholy, these images had a profound influence on photographer Martin Parr, who has made a selection from our Tony Ray-Jones archive for this exhibition including over 50 previously unseen photographs. 

Parr's selection will be shown alongside his rarely seen work, The Non-Conformists, which documents a declining traditional way of life in 1970s Hebden Bridge.

If you are looking for eccentric social customs then you can't do better than the bottle kicking and hare pie scrambling that takes place at Hallaton in Leicestershire each Easter Monday. Sure enough, as the photograph above shows, Ray-Jones visited this event in 1967. (Later. But why does the shopfront say 'Hungerford?' Hmm.)

The video below will tell you more about the exhibition and the two photographers.

Harborough Museum reopens on Tuesday

Harborough Museum will reopen on Tuesday 8 April.

It has been closed since November 2012 during the major refurbishment and reordering of the Symington Building, which houses the museum, Market Harborough library and the offices of Harborough District Council. In future it will also have some retail units  - including, it seems, an ice cream parlour.

Reporting the museum reopening, the Leicester Mercury says:

Pride of place will go to the re-instated Hallaton hoard of Roman coins and artefacts at the expanded museum and library, on the first floor of the Saddington (sic) Building. 

David Johnson, interim chairman of the museum trust, said: "Over the past few weeks, I have seen all the fantastic objects from the Harborough Collection take their places in the new display cases. 

"There is so much more to see than before, something new to discover on every visit." 

Some displays, including on boot and shoe and clothing manufacturing, are being extended. 

Mr Johnson said: "I'm sure when the visitors flood through the doors they will all be impressed with what they see and appreciate all the hard work the people involved have invested in this project."

David tells me that an independent charity called Harborough Museum Trust has been created to ensure the future of the museum .

He says:

"This Trust has begun to plan for the future, with three interim trustees already in place. Local people are being sought to add to this and form an effective board of trustees from different backgrounds and areas of expertise. We want the people of the district to have a sense of ownership of our history through this wonderful collection of objects in this great new-look museum. 

"As time goes on there will be opportunities for local people to get more involved with every aspect of the museum. We are hoping to enlist the help of lots of volunteers who will have the chance to enrich their lives with anything from meeting and greeting visitors to running fund raising events and helping with the day to day running of our museum."

If you are interested in becoming involved with the Harborough Museum as a trusteee of volunteer, the person to contact is Jane Tugwell.