Little-known Leicestershire and Rutland 2: Medieval crosses

The second of three parts of Bob Trubshaw's series on little-known Leicestershire and Rutland.

A diesel gala on the Great Central at Loughborough

"People will never mourn diesels the way they mourned steam locomotives," I used to be told. But from my experience the high point of railway enthusiasm in Britain came at Christmas 1981 when the last Deltic-hauled British Rail passenger service ran.

I photographed it at Castle Bytham and will reproduce the photo here one day.

After that, public ridicule and the rationalisation of BR's locomotive fleet meant that things were never the same again.

Since you ask, Deltics were powerful diesel locomotives that used to haul the expresses from King's Cross to Edinburgh. By the time I was a student in York, they had been demoted to taking charge of the stopping trains from there to London.

When I heard there was to be a diesel gala on the Great Central at Loughborough yesterday, and that a Deltic would be among the locomotives working, I made plans to visit.

Ironically, when I wandered back on to the platform at Leicester after doing some shopping, I found a steam locomotive in the station - Union of South Africa.

And as I headed to Loughborough I saw in the depot just north of Leicester station a class 50 and my old friend the class 27 that used to live at Knighton Junction.

I was not disappointed by the gala and took these photographs. The Deltic - 55 019 Royal Highland Fusilier - is in the first five photos here.

There was also a diesel multiple-unit service on the Mountsorrel branch, but I did not find the time to take it. A pleasure for another day.

Steam and diesel on the Mountsorrel branch

Last November I visited the Great Central's Mountsorrel station and found everything locked up for the winter.

This video was shot last month. It shows steam and diesel traction using the line.

I went through Loughborough today and saw work going on to join the two halves of the Great Central by restoring the embankment and bridge over the Midland line. Exciting days.

From Sileby to Mountsorrel

Just a short walk in the Leicestershire countryside with a music festival, a cricket match, weirs, a Lancaster bomber, threatening signs and a pub.

Mountsorrel - the largest granite quarry in Europe

Mountsorrel station took some finding. I imagined it down in the valley somewhere near the River Soar, but it was a long way from the village and up a hill.

On the way I passed Mountsorrel Quarry, the largest granite quarry in Europe. There turned out to be a public footpath heading off into it, with the result that I was able to take these photographs.

The vehicles reminded me of Tonka Toys or an episode of Thunderbirds.

The Butter Market, Mountsorrel

The Butter Market was put up in 1793 by Sir John Danvers to replace Mountsorrel's medieval market cross.

Danvers had moved the cross to his estate at nearby Swithland Hall, where it still stands.

You can read about the Butter Market's later history on Mountsorrel Archive.

Mountsorrel Hall and Gladstone's birthplace

This is the former Mountsorrel Hall in Leicestershire. This striking 18th-century brick building in a village built largely from the local granite was at first a private house but later became the rectory for the village.

As Pevsner observes, the house does not really go back far enough to justify this grand facade.

On the building is a modern plaque telling us that William Gladstone's birthplace in Rodney Street, Liverpool, was a copy of Mountsorrel Hall.

As the photograph below, taken from a post on The Victorian Web by Jaqueline Banerjee, shows, while there are similarities between the two buildings, this is a fanciful claim.

Finding Mountsorrel station

A year ago the Mountsorrel branch reopened and I decided to go and look for it myself today.

I found Mountsorrel station some way uphill from the centre of the village. A poster claimed heritage trains run throughout the year, but there were no signs of activity. The site was locked up and something of a challenge to photograph,

You can read about the history of the branch and of the effort that went into its restoration on the Mountsorrel and Rothley Community Heritage Centre site.

And you can watch a video of steam on the line on this blog.

The Mountsorrel branch reopened today

From the Loughborough Echo:

A newly restored railway line in Mountsorrel will be opened this weekend, the latest addition to the Great Central Railway. 

The project to restore the Mountsorrel Railway, which once served the granite quarries of the village, has been undertaken entirely by volunteers from the local community and beyond ... 

Not content with restoring the railway, the group then set out to create a brand new railway station at Mountsorrel. 

Steve added: “When the Mountsorrel Railway was built originally, it was always intended that Mountsorrel would have a station but that dream was never realised. 

"That was something that we wanted to put right so that the public could ride the railway that we had restored."

Thanks to a grant of £66,000 from Tarmac’s Landfill Community fund, and more work by the volunteers, Mountsorrel now has a railway station, on Bond Lane.

The Humber Stone, Leicester

This is the Humber Stone, which stands beside a roundabout on Leicester's ring road.

Some say the village of Humberstone got its name from the stone, but it may be that the stone's modern name comes from the village as it has had other names - Hell Stone, Holy Stone, Hoston and Holston.

This Was Leicestershire will give you the Humber Stone's geology and history:

So what is the Humber Stone, speaking geologically? It is probably an “erratic”; a large block of rock transported by the action of glaciers and plonked down, now out of place, when the ice retreated. This would have happened about 440,000 years ago, during the Anglian Ice Age, when Leicester was traversed by swathes of thick ice. The rock is syenite granite, the nearest source of which is Mountsorrel, five-and-a-half miles away.

A modern visitor to the Humber Stone will only see the top of the nine feet-high stone. The Humber Stone was fully exposed in 1881, for a geologist’s report, and the findings were documented by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Stone was described as being pentagonal in shape, with a heavily grooved top and vertical sides. The report states that the grooves were created after the block was deposited – by artificial as well as natural causes.

With names like the Hell Stone and the Holy Stone in the air, we could be in one of those 1970s supernatural children' TV series. So it is not a surprise that the website goes on to say:

“Boy drew creature that stood beside his bed” was a Leicester Mercury headline as recently as 1980, when a 10-year-old boy, living close to the Humber Stone, had constant “visits” from a devilish entity. It was, apparently, a creature with a goat’s head and long curving horns, a man’s body and cloven hoofs. After drawing it at school, the boy’s teacher asked what it was. “I don’t know, miss”, he said. “It’s the thing I sometimes see at the end of my bed”.

Getting from Humberstone to the Humber Stone proved harder than I had expected. There was no safe path beside the ring road and a couple of attempts to get there across the fields had to be aborted.

So I took a slight detour through the suburb of new Hamilton, which is named after a lost medieval village but was built over the last 20 years. It was pleasant enough, but there was no one about and, in particular, no children playing out. That was spooky too.

Incidentally, the construction of the ring road may have revealed and destroyed something significant. A comment on This Was Leicestershire recalls:

My late uncle who lived in the village told me that during the work for the new road and roundabout quite a few other large stones were simply tossed aside by the JCBs so we will never know if the Humber stone was actually part of a stone circle.

Steam on the Mountsorrel branch

On Thursday the Mountsorrel branch in Leicestershire saw its first train in over 50 years.

Read more about it on The Mountsorrel Railway.