Around Northampton
A few miles outside Northampton, in opposite directions, both Althorp, family home of the Spencers and the burial place of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Stoke Bruerne, an intriguing canalside village, make good stop-offs. Further out is the delightful village of Fotheringhay, where Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned and executed.
Althorp
The Spencer family lived at the lavish country home and estate of
Althorp
for centuries, which was of little interest to anyone else until one of the tribe,
Diana
, married Prince Charles in 1981. The disintegration of the marriage and Diana’s elevation to sainthood is a story known to millions, and the public outpouring of grief following Diana’s death in 1997 was quite astounding. Momentarily, Althorp became the focus of massive media attention as the coffin was brought up the M1 motorway from London to be buried on an island in the grounds of the family estate. Today, visitors still troop round the grandiloquent rooms of Althorp house, drop by the
Diana exhibition
in the old stable block, and then take the footpath that leads round a lake in the middle of which is the islet (no access) where Diana is buried.
Fotheringhay
Hard to believe today, but pocket-sized FOTHERINGHAY, a delightful hamlet nestling by the River Nene about thirty miles northeast of Northampton, is where Mary, Queen of Scots came to her untimely end. The castle where she was imprisoned and died has long gone, and the village has been left to its own devices for centuries, but its medieval heyday is recalled by the magnificent church of St Mary and All Saints, which rises mirage-like above the green riverine meadows.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch and around
ASHBY-DE-LA-ZOUCH, fourteen miles northwest of Leicester, takes its fanciful name from two sources – the town’s first Norman overlord was Alain de Parrhoet la Souche and the rest means “place by the ash trees”. Nowadays, Ashby is far from rustic, but it’s still an amiable little place with one main attraction, its castle.
Just a few miles away, Breedon-on-the-Hill is well worth a trip for its good walking and great views, and some fascinating Anglo-Saxon carvings at the Church of St Mary and St Hardulph.
Breedon-on-the-Hill
It’s five miles northeast from Ashby to the village of BREEDON-ON-THE-HILL, which sits in the shadow of the large, partly quarried hill from which it takes its name. A steep footpath and a winding, half-mile by-road lead up from the village to the summit, from where there are smashing views over the surrounding countryside.
Church of St Mary and St Hardulph
Breedon is also the site of the fascinating church of St Mary and St Hardulph, which occupies the site of an Iron Age hill fort and an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monastery. Mostly dating from the thirteenth century, the church is kitted out with a Georgian pulpit and pews as well as a large and distinctly rickety box pew. Much more rare are a number of Anglo-Saxon carvings that include individual saints and prophets and wall friezes, where a dense foliage of vines is inhabited by a tangle of animals and humans. The friezes are quite extraordinary, and the fact that the figures look Byzantine rather than Anglo-Saxon has fuelled much academic debate.
Leicester
At first glance, LEICESTER, some 25 miles south of Nottingham, seems a resolutely modern city, but further inspection reveals traces of its medieval and Roman past, situated immediately to the west of the downtown shopping area near the River Soar.
It’s probably fair to say that Leicester has a reputation for looking rather glum, but the centre is very much on the move, with the addition of Highcross, a brand new shopping centre, and the creation of a Cultural Quarter equipped with a flashy performance venue, Curve Theatre. The star turn, however, is the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, which includes an exemplary collection of German Expressionist paintings. About a third of Leicester’s population is Asian – the city elected England’s first Asian MP, Keith Vaz, in 1987. The focus of the Asian community is the Belgrave Road and its environs, an area of terraced houses about a mile to the northeast of the city centre beyond the flyover, where people come from miles around to eat at the splendid Indian restaurants.
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Brief history
The Romans chose this site to keep an eye on the rebellious Corieltauvi, constructing a fortified town beside the Fosse Way (now the A46), the military road running from Lincoln to Cirencester. Later, the Emperor Hadrian kitted the place out with huge public buildings, though the Danes, who overran the area in the eighth century, were not overly impressed and didn’t even bother to pilfer much of the stone. Later still, the town’s medieval castle became the base of the earls of Leicester, the most distinguished of whom was Simon de Montfort, who forced Henry III to convene the first English Parliament in 1265. Since the late seventeenth century, Leicester has been a centre of the hosiery trade and it was this industry that attracted hundreds of Asian immigrants to settle here in the 1950s and 1960s.
Leicester festivals
Belgrave is the hub for two major Hindu festivals – Diwali, the Festival of Light, held in October or November, when six thousand lamps are strung out along Belgrave Road, and Navratri, a nine-day celebration in October held in honour of the goddess Durga. In addition, the city’s sizeable Afro-Caribbean community holds England’s second biggest street festival after the Notting Hill Carnival, the Leicester Caribbean Carnival, on the first weekend in August.
Lincoln
Reaching high into the sky from the top of a steep hill, the triple towers of LINCOLN’s mighty cathedral are visible for miles across the surrounding flatlands. The cathedral, along with the castle, are the city’s main tourist draws – although Lindum Colonia was an important Roman city, few fragments of this era survive.
For visitors, almost everything of interest is confined to the Uphill part of town, within easy walking distance of both castle and cathedral. In addition to the major sights, this part of town also features a number of historic remains, notably several chunks of Roman wall, the most prominent of which is the second-century Newport Arch straddling Bailgate and once the main north gate into the city. There are also several well-preserved medieval stone houses, notably on and around the aptly named Steep Hill as it cuts down from the cathedral to the city centre.
The key sights can be seen in about half a day, though Lincoln does make for a pleasant overnight stop, particularly in December during its lively open-air Christmas market.
Brief history
High ground is in short supply in Lincolnshire, so it’s no surprise that the steep hill that is today surmounted by Lincoln Cathedral was fortified early, firstly by the Celts, who called their settlement Lindon, “hillfort by the lake”, a reference to the pools formed by the River Witham in the marshy ground below. In 47 AD the Romans occupied Lindon and built a fortified town, which subsequently became Lindum Colonia, one of the four regional capitals of Roman Britain. During the reign of William the Conqueror the construction of the castle and cathedral initiated Lincoln’s medieval heyday – the town boomed, first as a Norman power base and then as a centre of the wool trade with Flanders, until 1369 when the wool market was transferred to neighbouring Boston. It was almost five hundred years before Lincoln could revive, its recovery based upon the manufacture of agricultural machinery and drainage equipment for the neighbouring fenlands. As the nineteenth-century town spread south down the hill and out along the old Roman road – the Fosse Way – so Lincoln became a place of precise class distinctions: the Uphill area, spreading north from the cathedral, became synonymous with middle-class respectability, Downhill with the proletariat.
Lincoln Cathedral
Not a hill at all,
Castle Hill
is in fact a wide, short and level cobbled street that links Lincoln’s castle and cathedral. It’s a charming spot and its east end is marked by the arches of the medieval
Exchequergate
, beyond which soars the glorious west front of
Lincoln Cathedral
, a veritable cliff-face of blind arcading mobbed by decorative carving. The west front’s apparent homogeneity is, however, deceptive, and further inspection reveals two phases of construction – the small stones and thick mortar of much of the facade belong to the original church, completed in 1092, whereas the longer stones and finer courses date from the early thirteenth century. These were enforced works: in 1185, an earthquake shattered much of the Norman church, which was then rebuilt under the auspices of
Bishop Hugh of Avalon
, the man responsible for most of the present cathedral, with the notable exception of the (largely) fourteenth-century central tower.
The cavernous interior is a fine example of Early English architecture, with the nave’s pillars conforming to the same general design yet differing slightly, their varied columns and bands of dark Purbeck marble contrasting with the oolitic limestone that is the building’s main material. Looking back up the nave from beneath the central tower, you can also observe a major medieval cock-up: Bishop Hugh’s roof is out of alignment with the earlier west front, and the point where they meet has all the wrong angles. It’s possible to pick out other irregularities, too – the pillars have bases of different heights, and there are ten windows in the nave’s north wall and nine in the south – but these are deliberate features, reflecting a medieval aversion to the vanity of symmetry.
Beyond the nave lies St Hugh’s Choir, whose fourteenth-century misericords carry an eccentric range of carvings, with scenes from the life of Alexander the Great and King Arthur mixed up with biblical characters and folkloric parables. Further on is the open and airy Angel Choir, completed in 1280 and famous for the tiny, finely carved Lincoln Imp, which embellishes one of its columns. Finally, a corridor off the choir’s north aisle leads to the wooden-roofed cloisters and the polygonal chapter house, where Edward I and Edward II convened gatherings that pre-figured the creation of the English Parliament.
The Lincoln imp
Legends had abounded for centuries about the Lincoln imp, carved high on a column in Lincoln cathedral, but it was the entrepreneurial James Ward Usher in the 1880s who turned the wee beastie into a tidy profit, selling Lincoln imp tie-pins, cuff-links, spoons, brooches and beads. Usher also popularized the traditional legend of the imp, a tall tale in which a couple of imps are blown to Lincoln by a playful wind. They then proceed to hop around the cathedral, until one of them is turned to stone for trying to talk to the angels carved into the roof of the Angel Choir. His chum makes a hasty exit on the back of a witch, but the wind is still supposed to haunt the cathedral, awaiting its opportunity to be mischievous again.