My latest article for Central Bylines... Paddy Logan: Harborough’s radical Liberal hero

I've had another piece published on Central Bylines this morning. It looks at the career of J.W. "Paddy" Logan, who was Liberal MP for Harborough from 1891 to 1904 and 1910 to 1916.

Here he is speaking in the Commons in 1897:

In the Board Schools the children were not taught to curtsey to the squire or to the parson. In the Church Schools the children were taught to fall down and worship the great god of the Clerical party – the landowner. Hon. Gentlemen might laugh, but he knew what he was talking about. He saw it too frequently.

What the children were being taught in thousands of villages today might be summed up in the words: “God bless the Squire and the Squire’s relations/And make us know our proper stations.” … The Church had always been against progress.

Uncannily, I invented Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans years before I read of Mr Logan's cottage home at East Langton.

J.W. Logan left an estate worth £13m in today's money

My hero J.W. Logan – nicknamed "Paddy Logan" for his strong support for Irish home rule – died in 1925. He had been Liberal MP for Harborough from 1891 to 1904 and from 1910 to 1916.

He left, reported the London Daily Chronicle (Monday 21 September 1925), an estate of £167,159.

According to an online inflation calculator, £100 in 1925 is worth £7,769.23 today. So, after consulting the University of Rutland's celebrated Department of Hard Sums, I can reveal that Logan left an estate worth almost £13m.

No wonder he was able to provide Market Harborough with swimming baths and sports and recreation grounds. He also bought the local paper to ensure good coverage for the Liberals - what Nick Gibb would call "impartial" coverage.

The Daily Chronicle report lists some annuities that Logan bequeathed to his staff, among them his gardener.

My suspicion is that Lord Bonkers has made similarly generous provision for Meadowcroft in his will, but is determined to become immortal – all those trips to Hebden Bridge to bathe in the spring of immortal life that bursts from the ground below the former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors and all those bottle of cordial he buys from the Elves of Rockingham Forest – so it is never paid out.

Drought on the Leicestershire-Rutland border, 1947

Early in 1947 England was hit by serious flooding, but by September there was a different problem: drought.

The video above comes from this part of the world, and there's more detail in this cutting from the Leicester Mercury (28 October 1947):

Harborough Villages Short of Water 

A water shortage in several villages near Market Harborough has reached serious proportions and arrangements never been more extensive in the 12 years Mr R. W. Turner has been surveyor to the Harborough Rural District Council.

The shortage is particularly acute at Husbands Bosworth but wells have also dried up at Saddington, East Langton, Shangton, Stonton-Wyville and Slawston. 

To all these villages the Rural District Council is sending emergency supplies on alternate days, when a lorry with a 500-gallon tank is met by villagers with buckets baths and other receptacles.

I remember following a village heritage trail around Husbands Bosworth and being surprised at how late mains water came to the village.

And Stonton Wyville gets another mention on Liberal England, but it's odd to see the name hyphenated like that.

Your chance to own J.W. Logan MP's cottage home for the children of men injured on his works

I posted this photo to Bluesky this morning on the #AdoorableThursday hashtag. The door is to be found at Deene Cottage in East Langton.

Over to the Victoria County History entry for the village:

In 1898 Logan erected a cottage home for the children of men permanently injured on public works, with preference for the employees of Logan & Hemingway. The cottage home is now a private house called Dean Cottage.

In fact it's called Deene Cottage. An auction notice in the Midland Mail for 9 November 1917 suggests that is when it ceased being a children's home, as all the fixtures and furniture are being sold off.

If you want to know more, have a look at the Strutt & Parker website, because Deene Cottage is currently up for sale and there are lots of photographs of it there.

Incidentally, Dene Cottage was not the inspiration for Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans. I had already dreamt that up when I discovered Mr Logan's establishment.

Later. It's sold.

I can remember when it was the Tories who repaired church roofs

When I go to St Peter's, Church Langton, to pay my respects to Paddy Logan, I also visit the grave of Colonel Hignett.

Hignett bought East Langton Grange, Logan's old home, in 1935, and was still around 50 years later when I got involved in local politics here. He was a Conservative of the old school.

I thought of him when Kemi Badenoch made her invaluable (to us) remark about the Liberal Democrats being the sort of people who repaired your church roof. As I once recalled here:

I came across him several times and he had an unnerving habit of starting telephone calls with "Now, look here...". Fortunately, this was generally followed with "...if I can be any help, you let me know."

When the church roof at Church Langton needed repairing and the estimate from the builders proved too high ("They could put that where the monkey put the nuts"), he organised the locals to do the job themselves and was filmed by local television as he directed operations up on the roof at the age of 90.

East Langton Liberal Club opened in 1889

I knew Paddy Logan had given a village hall to East Langton and maintained an orphanage there for the children of men killed on his works, but a Liberal in the village is news to me.

This report is from the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail for 8 January 1889 - two years before Logan was elected to the Commons in a by-election:

East Langton: Opening of the Liberal Club

On Thursday last the opening of the new Liberal Club at East Langton was inaugurated by a dinner provided by the members. Over 50 sat down to the spread, Major Gibson presiding, in the absence of J. W, Logan, Esq., who had met with an accident on the previous day. 

After the tables had been cleared, speeches were given by a number of the gentlemen present, and an enjoyable time was spent. There was a good contingent from Harborough amongst the guests.

Logan, a fearsome rider to hounds with the Fernie, may well have met with his accident in the hunting field.

We knew how to celebrate election victories in Harborough in 1892

This blog's hero J.W. 'Paddy' Logan gained Harborough from the Conservatives at a by-election in May 1891 and held it at the general election the following July.

The Leicester Chronicle (8 August 1892) reported the resultant celebrations:

On Saturday afternoon the Liberals of the Harborough Division visited the residence of Mr, J.W. Logan, M.P., at East Langton Grange, to celebrate the triumphant return of that gentleman to Parliament. 

An immense number of people were present from all parts of the division, long special trains running from Leicester. 

Tea was partaken of in the riding school, and in the evening a public meeting was held, when congratulatory speeches were delivered, to which Mr. Logan responded.

Mr Logan's hunter Lottery was named after the famous racehorse

A reader has kindly directed me to a document on the neighbourhood plan review for East Langton parish, which mentions the monument to J.W. Logan MP's favourite hunter Lottery. (It's hard to link to, so I have pasted the relevant extract above).

As I blogged a couple of days ago, this is widely claimed to be the grave of Lottery, the winner of the first Grand National in 1839, or at least a monument to him. But my discovery that Logan had a horse called Lottery makes that beast a much better candidate for the dedicatee.

Because the story about the Grand National winner ending his days at East Langton never really added up. Thoroughbred Heritage tells us (scroll down the page, because most of it's about this Lottery's father, who was also called Lottery) that the horse was foaled in 1829.

After detailing his many triumphs, the site records Lottery's final days:

The last race of his career was at Windsor in April, 1844. For some time after his retirement, he served as his trainer's hack. Later, he was sent to a Mr. Hall, who had a pack of harriers at Neasden, and it is said he was put to ploughing when he was "too much played-out to stand cross-country work." He was buried at Astley Grange Farm stud at East Langton, Leicestershire.

The greatest Grand National horse, Red Rum, lived to be 30, and I believe that is a typical lifespan for a racehorse. So there is no way in the world that this horse lived until 1886 - at East Langton or anywhere else.

Lottery's sad decline after the end of his racing career reminds me of the hero of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. I fear that when he became too old for ploughing, his next appointment was at the local glue factory.

Four quick points about the extract from the document above:

• I love the detail that Paddy Logan named his hunter after the great racehorse. I shall take this as authentic local knowledge.
• The same goes for this being a gravestone rather than just a monument, but it is, of course, dated 1886 and not 1896.
• I suspect the, surely untrue, sentence about the Grand National winner Lottery also ending up at East Langton is taken from an earlier blog post of mine.
• Why? Because they've used my photos from that post.

The idea that the winner of the first Grand National is buried at East Langton will probably prove one of those 'zombie facts' that keeps being repeated and will not die. I have played my part in passing it on, and I apologise.

But there is hope. The zombie fact that Reginald Gough, who was convicted of the manslaughter of Dennis O'Neill, later had his conviction changed to one of murder and his sentence lengthened by some unspecified process, is now specifically contradicted in the Wikipedia article on the case.

The Lottery buried at East Langton is not the winner of the first Grand National but a hunter owned by J.W. Logan MP

Later. There's a little more on Mr Logan's horse here.

I am reading John Masefield's The Midnight Folk, which is an earlier story about Kay Harker from The Box of Delights. Here Kay is tangling with his governess Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, who is also a witch and an acolyte of the villainous Abner Brown.

Early in the book, Masefield mentions "that famous horse Lottery at various stages of the steeplechase, the prints of which hung in the study". This name leapt out at me, because I once came across what Thoroughbred Heritage says is a monument to Lottery just outside the village of East Langton.

I set out to photograph it on my very first day out with a digital camera. Perhaps that's why I didn't take a better photo, though I do remember it was a baking hot day and I had to look south to take it.

Just now I searched the British Newspaper Archive for a story about the burial or commemoration of Lottery at East Langton. What I found was one that proved that this Lottery was not the winner of the first Grand National, but a hunter owned by this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP.

So here's the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail for 12 May 1939:

In view of the great interest taken by listeners acquainted with the Langtons. the writer of this thought the following particulars might be of interest to local readers of this paper. It was a pity no reference was made to Mr. Logan's famous hunter "Lottery." 

In the late seventies and early eighties, of the last century, every boy in the Langtons and adjoining villages could tell some amazing stories of this horse and Mr. Logan, his rider. “Lottery" was brought out of a plough team in Ireland by Mr. Logan, and it is said he never once had an accident or went lame, and never once missed his turn to carry Mr. Logan, who hunted and rode him till he was well on in his teens. 

One of his most amazing jumping feats was during a fast run of Sir Bache Cunard’s (now the Femie) Hounds. The fox and hounds had swam the canal and a field of two hundred horsemen and hunt staffs had go some distance round by a canal bridge. 

Mr. Logan was as usual, somewhere in the front rank of riders, left them and put his horse "Lottery." at the canal, and landed in the shallow water close up the towing path. With another spring he was out of the water and on the towing path, and went a few yards and then cleared the hedge, following the pack by himself and leaving the large field simply gasping with amazement. This happened in the Smeeton district and was the talk of the district all thot winter. 

It is said that several times “Lottery” jumped the Burton Overy brook, other riders following. and he could jump the country anywhere Of course, everyone knew that at that time Mr. Logan was one of the finest riders in the country and no one was surprised when a fair number of years later he won the House of Commons Steeplechase on "Chic.” 

During the later years of his hunting career Mr. Logan set a new fox covert which he called Home Rule Covert, though one never sees the name mentioned in foxhunting reports now.

I love Home Rule Covert, and it strengthens my theory that Logan's nickname of Paddy was given to him locally because of his pro-Irish sympathies.

Saxon sculpture: Meet the Church Langton Chappie

He lives high on the wall of the passage that leads from the chancel to the vestry at St Peter's Church Langton. You have to turn a light on to take his photo - and they ask you to remember to turn it off afterwards.

The guidebook say he dates from the 10th century and likens his style to the Saxon carvings at Breedon on the Hill. Could he be a relic of an earlier church on this site?

The fact that he is wielding a hammer may mean he represents St Dunstan, who is the patron saint of blacksmiths.

A memorial to Covid victims in the churchyard at Church Langton

I went to The Langtons this afternoon. I wanted to try the reopened Bell at East Langton, believed by many to be an inspiration for the Bonkers' Arms, and to pay my respects at the grave of this blog's hero J.W. Logan at Church Langton.

This tree, planted as a memorial for the people from Church Langton who died from Covid, or at least during the Covid pandemic, is also in the churchyard at St Peter's, Church Langton.

The Bell at East Langton will reopen on Friday

At last some good news. The Leicester Mercury reports:

A pub in an idyllic village near Market Harborough which shut during the pandemic is preparing to reopen under new management. The Bell, in Main Street, East Langton, will be welcoming customers again from this Friday, October 13.

The pub, which dates back to the 17th Century, has been taken over by Neil and Steph Price who also run The George at Ashley.

While scholars agree that the model for Bonkers Hall is Nevill Holt Hall near Medbourne, East Langton is most often cited as the inspiration for the village to which Lord Bonkers often refers.

My hero J.W. Logan MP lived at East Langton Grange and established a cottage home in the village for the children of men who were killed on his railway works. I had already invented Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans when I discovered this.

So The Bell must surely be the model for the Bonkers' Arms. It has a lovely beer garden in front and Mr Logan's cricket ground is across the road.

I wish the new management all the best in reviving what was until recently a thriving pub.

Kibworth Harcourt windmill and St Peter's, Church Langton, are hosting Heritage Open Days

This year's Heritage Open Days events are taking place between 8 and 15 September. Two venues near Market Harborough have caught my eye: Kibworth Harcourt Windmill and St Peter's, Church Langton.

The windmill, which is not normally open to the public, is offering guided tours on Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 September:

Built-in the early 18th century, Kibworth Harcourt Mill is the only surviving post mill in Leicestershire, with the oldest parts dating from around 1600. Visitors can see the working mechanisms of the mill, historic graffiti dating from 1711, and burn marks and witch marks added to ward off evil spirits.

In 2021-2, the mill was fully repaired by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and its Mills Section, and we’re delighted that in 2022 it was removed from Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register. Today the mill is a Grade II* listed building, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and a crucial part of our local and national milling heritage.

Tours must be booked in advance - see the link above.

And St Peter's is offering children's activities and guided tours on Sunday 10 and Sunday 17 September:

You will see carved medieval bosses, corbels and a figurine, a 17th century font cover and tomb effigy, an 18th century organ casing, and elaborate Victorian wood carving, Reid’s alabaster reredos carving of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and decorative Swithland slate headstones including what is said to be the best gravestone image in Leicestershire. 

The stained glass has fine examples of Pre Raphaelite designs and quality Victorian glass. There are Minton floor tiles and of course, the music of Handel, as St. Peter’s held the first performance in a parish church in England of the Messiah on 27 September 1759. 

We also have one, of only two, prints of the Rector William Hanbury who organised the performance. A feast of creativity for all.

The children’s activities will include gravestone rubbing, making tissue paper stained glass windows, copying and designing tiles and searching games.

And in the churchyard you can see the grave of this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP. Again, places must be booked in advance via the link above.

The Heritage Open Days website has a searchable database of events, so you can find one near you.

Market Harborough buses under threat from Conservative chaos

Some bus routes serving Market Harborough could be scrapped because of the the budget crisis facing Leicestershire County Council.

HFM News, with a clip from an interview with Liberal Democrat councillor Simon Galton, reports:

The authority has warned its financial outlook is ‘dire’ and ahead of budget proposals being made public next week, some details have been shared with councillors.

Cuts could be made to bus services subsidised by the authority, which include the number 33 town service in Market Harborough and route 44, which links the town with Foxton and Fleckney.

Conservatives are now a complete shambles. Only last year the government announced a £3bn scheme to improve bus services outside London.

We were promised hundreds of miles of new bus lanes, fares with daily price caps so people can use the bus as many times a day as they need, more services in the evenings and at weekends, integration with train tickets and that all buses would accept contactless payments.

The Guardian caught the rapturous tone of the announcement:

The DfT said it expected to see local authorities and operators working together to deliver bus services so frequent that passengers could just "turn up and go" - no longer needing to rely on a traditional timetable and no longer having to wait more than a few minutes.

Boris Johnson said: "Just as they did in London, our reforms will make buses the transport of choice, reducing the number of car journeys and improving quality of life for millions."

Leicestershire County Council did put in a £58m for more government funding for bus services earlier this year, apparently because it "lacked ambition".

How things have turned out is a classic illustration of Boris Johnson's ability to identify issues that matter to voters and his inability to be arsed to do anything about them, and also of the damage done by too many changes at 10 and 11 Downing Street.

Because Market Harborough is not alone in facing cuts to its bus services. 

Back in July, the Guardian reported that at least 135 bus routes across England were due to be cut or scrapped altogether.

And in case you thought "levelling up" would save the North of England from cuts, 25 routes in Liverpool and 40 across the North East were affected.

But that's the modern Conservative Party for you. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing, and you can be sure that, if it ever finds out, it will do its best to stop it.

J.W. Logan MP and his portable meeting room Free Speech Hall

Denied the use of village school halls by the Tories, my hero J.W. Logan took his own building around with him. I had imagined that it was some kind of tent, but an account in the Leicester Chronicle of 7 December 1889 shows it was far more than that:

On Saturday evening Mr. J.W. Logan, the Liberal candidate for the Market Harborough Division, addressed crowded meeting at Church Langton in his new portable building, to which has been given the appropriate appellation of Free Speech Hall. 

The building is an exceedingly neat and commodious wooden structure of oblong shape, being thirty feet long by twelve feet broad, and capable of accommodating about 150 people. Seats are arranged on each side to hold four, leaving a gangway up the centre by which the platform is reached. 

The heating apparatus consists of an elegant little stove, light being supplied by means of a couple of large lamps pendant from the top. When lighted and comfortably warmed and filled with an enthusiastic audience, as was Free Speech Hall on Saturday evening, it is not easy to imagine when inside that the erection is anything other than a permanent one. 

A lamp is hung at the entrance outside, and along one of the outer flanks is inscribed in large characters, "The system that will not bear discussion is doomed." 

The whole affair affords an additional earnest of the zeal and indomitable pluck of Mr. Logan in the cause which he has so thoroughly at heart, and is calculated to falsify the prophetic inspiration of his Tory friends, that he would ere long return to their fold - the wish of course being father to the thought.

Logan did start out as a Conservative, but - at least as he told the story - he was so shocked by the poverty he saw in Ireland that he became a Liberal and a thoroughgoing Radical at that. I must blog about this one day.

The Chronicle, which was clearly a splendidly Liberal newspaper, said that this Church Langton meeting was held "on the Green, in proximity to the rectory gate".

This puts it more or less in the area shown in the photograph above. This now includes the village war memorial, which includes the name of Logan's son Hugh, who was four years old when this meeting took place.

Harborough District Walking Festival, 26-29 May 2022

"Come and discover an often overlooked part of England," says the website for this month's Harborough District Walking Festival:

The Harborough district is an area of rolling countryside, ancient pastures and farmland, streams, woodland spinneys and beautiful villages. Canals, battles and buried treasure are all there to be explored – not to mention local characters and ancient customs.

All the Festival walks are led by two experienced guides, so your walk will be enhanced with fascinating details of the local area and its history

Thursday 26 May

Morning walk: Rolleston and Noseley (no stiles)

Afternoon walk: Tugby, Rolleston and Skeffington

Friday 27 May
Morning walk: Claybrooke Parva and Fosse Way

Afternoon walk: Brampton Valley Way (wheelchair friendly)

Saturday 28 May
Morning walk: Hallaton, Cranoe and Slawston

Afternoon walk: Saddington, Gumley and Laughton

Sunday 29 May
The Langtons

There is a charge for each walk and places are limited. You can book via the Festival website.

James Carpenter, one of the Festival guides, runs an extensive programme of public guided walks based around Market Harborough and Lutterworth. Full details can be found online.

GUEST POST Saving Church Langton's open space from the Diocese of Leicester

Anthony Lawton on a Leicestershire village's campaign to defend its only open space.

I know far too little about my mother who, a single mother after being widowed when I was three, died herself when I was eighteen. I do recall she was a self-professed liberal and Liberal, committed to being active in the community. She also brought me up within the Church of England. 

However, although the impact of her liberalism and community action endures, fifty years on from teenage confirmation my church going days are long gone. A year of bewildering and stubborn behaviour by leaders and institutions in the Diocese of Leicester has seriously eroded what little faith that endured still, or at least in the church hierarchy beyond the parish.

For decades the grass, Thorpe Path Field and The Bucket, has been the one accessible open space within our village boundaries in rural Church Langton in Leicestershire. A public footpath crosses the land. There villagers of all ages walk and talk, congregate and play, and exercise dogs of many types and sizes in ways they cannot, despite appearances, in the privately owned farming land all around.

Donated, I believe, by the Revd William Hanbury to his charity founded in the 1750s to pursue grandiose plans for a national centre of learning to rival Oxford and Cambridge, the field was for many years part of the playing fields of the local school founded in the 1870s. In the early 2000s it passed from the stewardship of the Hanbury Charity to fellow charity, the Leicester Diocesan Board of Education (LDBE), in an asset-swap to facilitate the building of a new Langton Community Hall next to the school

LDBE trustees want to realise the value they think the field has as building land, despite it being formally designated ‘Open Space for Sport and Recreation’ by Harborough District Council, and despite the council leader asserting he sees no prospect of successful evasion of the implied responsibilities. To date, two planning applications and an appeal to the National Planning Inspector have been vigorously and successfully opposed by the community.

The Board of Education’s leaders have stated on the record, several times, that they have no intention to renew planning applications for the “foreseeable future”. The Board professes in its vision statement to work “with” local communities. Yet the it has in the last couple of years sought to exclude villagers from the field — save for access to the public footpath — against the wishes of the local community, in order to seek to graze livestock, without disclosing how this helps advance their long-term interests. 

Trustees have rejected all offers from villagers and the Parish Council to rent the land for village recreational use until such time as the Board is successful, if ever it is, in winning building permission. Some twenty four trustees, including the Bishop of Leicester, have resisted all the supportive entreaties of the local conservative MP, local district and county councillors, the leader of Harborough District Council, even the church’s own lay incumbent and the local parochial church council.

Despite numerous requests, and formal complaints to trustees and the Charity Commissioners, still no-one outside the charity has been given a clear, persuasive reason why the Board persists so stubbornly to reject community offers. One of the two formal objects of LDBE is always to embody the principles and doctrines of the CoE. I can recall no principle or doctrine which favours being untransparent, so disrespectful of local community interests, and so stubborn.

We "need to pray passionate prayers to change stubborn situations," wrote one local Reverend in a regular church column in the local paper. Characterising myself now as an unbeliever, and ever-influenced by my mother’s liberalism, I prefer to put my faith rather in the power of collective community action.

Mind you, the Diggers who in the 1600s actively opposed enclosures by the church and other landowners, believed in both prayer and action, in pursuit of their belief that "no man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain". 

That may be a belief too far for many. However the not-for-financial-profit Charity Board of Education trustees are stewards and custodians of the land which the board holds in trust for public benefit, not private gain. They should not be so focused upon profit-maximising.

I persist in believing they might be brought to their senses about their own diocese-wide interests, as well as the interests of the local community, by concerted community action, including the lobbying of political representatives of all persuasions and none. 

We will as committed active citizens continue actively and insightfully to collaborate to change this “stubborn situation”. But, inspired as I am by the Diggers and mindful of the local Reverend’s advice, I have said publicly I might just try some "passionate prayers" too.

You can follow Church Langton's Keep Our Open Space Open campaign on Twitter..

A new picture of my hero J.W. Logan MP

J.W. Logan's Wikipedia entry now has this picture of the great man.

It's not as good as the one of him with the East Langton ladies cricket team, mind.

Logan, as regular readers will know, was Liberal MP for Harborough between 1891 and 1904, and between 1910 and 1916.

They will also know that he once instigated a mass brawl on the floor of the Commons.

And as I recently blogged, Logan is quoted in The Shortest History of England by James Hawes.

£2m centrepiece of Henry VIII’s lost crown found in field near Market Harborough

Exciting news from the Tudor and Stuart correspondent of The Sun:

The centrepiece of Henry VIII’s lost crown has been found under a tree by an amateur treasure hunter.

Kevin Duckett ended a 400-year-old mystery when he dug up the solid gold figurine in a Northamptonshire field.

The 2½in-high, inch-wide piece, one of five on the Tudor crown, is now at the British Museum and could be worth £2million.

Experts say the find is one of the most significant by an amateur.

The field in question is at Little Oxendon, which is only a mile or so south of Market Harborough.]

Henry's crown survived until the Civil War, when parliament gave orders for it to be broken up, sold off and melted down.

Enticingly, it is on the route that Charles I took after fleeing his defeat at Naseby, which makes one speculate that he, or at least his retinue, lost or hid the jewel on that flight.

It is also on the route to Tur Langton, where legend has it that Charles watered his horse as he fled. You can see a rare 17th-century photograph of him doing so at the head of this post.

Inside St Andrew's, Tur Langton

Last time I visited Tur Langton it was to meet Charles I.

I was back there today and, because it was the day of Ride+Stride for Churches, I found the village's Victorian church unlocked for the first time.

Inside I found some pleasing use of contrasting bricks, and I have always liked the way that the windows that face across the fields are much larger than those that look out on to the village's main street.

But my chief memory will be those terrifying ladders.