Someone on Twitter was talking about Ashby St Ledgers. This is a small, attractive, village in Northamptonshire, famous for being home to the Catesby family and for its associations with the Gunpowder Plot. Then I remembered a brief winter’s morning…
I seem to have been passing through Rutland, England’s smallest county, for years. It just happens to be in the way when taking a particular route to or from the Deep South and the East Midlands. A leg of this…
Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, was one of the characters of Elizabethan England. Like the winner of a reality show, rising from relatively humble beginnings to rub shoulders with royalty, Bess is famous for being famous, a status assured…
It was the only time I ever saw our dour, ill-tempered, Polish foreman remotely happy. As a student one hot summer long ago, I had a labouring job on a new section of motorway. It stretched into the distance, an…
I will never weary of wandering round medieval cathedrals. The motivation and faith behind these places, as well as the financial and temporal power, is astonishing. I gaze in awe up at soaring arches, bathed in coloured sunlight, filtered through…
Crowland, Lincolnshire, is one of those little towns that Britain does so well. It is appealing, has a couple of fascinating historic attractions (a splendid half-ruined abbey church and a unique three-way medieval bridge), at least one decent tea and…
Some places inspire a sense of curious awe. Though the past is ubiquitous, shaping who and what we all are, there are particular spots on earth where the shades of great events and people gather, jostling for attention. Visiting them…
Attempting to write anything about Richard III is somewhat daunting. He was king of England for little over two years, from July 1483 until being slaughtered at the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485, yet he is one of…
Here’s a story with a healthy bite. There are thousands of varieties of apple, but just one that is generally considered to be the cook’s favourite in the UK – the Bramley. Bramley apples are large and green, with a…
There are so many reasons to visit Southwell Minster that it’s a good job someone decided to build it… A few miles north-west of Nottingham, in the English East Midlands, Southwell is neither on a major route to anywhere, nor…
So far, England has only had one King John, and he was a bad ‘un. However many times some historian suggests that this much-maligned monarch has been misrepresented, misunderstood, or was at least no worse than any other medieval king,…
There’s no need to hurry to see the unique Saxon church at earls Barton in Northamptonshire; it’s been there for a thousand years or more and will probably wait for you. There was probably a settlement at Earls Barton as…
Northamptonshire is blessed with some fine Saxon churches. And the largest – in fact the largest Anglo-Saxon church in Britain – is at Brixworth. Actually, a monastery was founded at Brixworth sometime before 675AD, more than 1300 years ago, when…
It is hard to associate the Northamptonshire village of Ashby St Ledgers with one of the most notorious terrorist plots of all time. In fact, despite nestling between Dunstable’s tired industrial estates and the fearsome Daventry International Rail Terminal to…