20 September 2022

Our first meeting of the autumn season was something a little different.  Instead of a speaker, we invited long-term residents of Thurcaston and Cropston to come and share their memories of life in the two villages.  It was lovely to see and hear from a good number of visitors in addition to our own members, which led to some lively discussions and one or two reunions between people who had not met for many decades.

The evening was led by our own Sylvia Cole, assisted by Colin Hyde from the East Midlands Oral History Archive.  Colin kicked off by playing a couple of recordings on the subject of healthcare and he asked what provision there was in our parish before the NHS.  The villages had no doctor but one who lived nearby could sometimes be persuaded to stop on his way home!  Those who contracted infectious diseases would isolate for several weeks at home or would go to a sanatorium at Markfield.  An infant welfare clinic was held each week in the Memorial Hall.  For mothers in childbirth, a midwife had to be fetched from Rothley, though up to the 1960s a Mrs Garner in Cropston could be called on to deliver babies or to lay out the dead.  When the Co-op in Thurcaston closed (where Tebbatt’s now is), villagers campaigned for it to become a surgery but were told there was already sufficient local provision.

Each village formerly had its own post office, where you could also buy some groceries.  In Cropston, meat was supplied by Bunny’s, who slaughtered their own cattle on site.  “Butch”, who worked there and also at the garage, was skilled at preparing any cut you wanted from the hanging carcasses but he gave up the business when hygiene rules were brought in.  It was not unknown to see him cycling back from Bradgate Park with a deer across his shoulders, while another character would tout pheasants and rabbits of dubious origin round the villages!

Many of our guests had been to school in Thurcaston and there was general agreement about which teachers were inspirational and which ones they hated.

Pupils – including those from Cropston – would walk home for lunch then return in the afternoon.  Later, lunches were delivered to the school in aluminium trays but they were not remembered fondly!  When numbers outgrew the Old School Rooms opposite the church, the Memorial Hall was used as an extra classroom until the new Richard Hill School was built.  The best students could win a scholarship to go to the grammar school at Quorn but most finished school at 14 or 15.  One option for the boys was then to move to an apprenticeship at the Rolls-Royce factory in Rothley.

The various pubs provoked a lot of memories.  You could play “devil among the tailors” (a type of table skittles) at the now-vanished King William IV.  There was a mynah bird at the Wheatsheaf in the 1960s, while one landlord at the Reservoir Inn had a pet fox, which would sit on his shoulder.  He was not too particular about the drinking age, being willing to serve you in your scout uniform!  Freddy King, who cleared glasses at the Bradgate Arms, would steal sweets from Cropston Post Office to give to the barmaids, who, knowing they were stolen, would bring them back again.

There were also many memories of the youth club held in the Memorial Hall and of the various people who ran it.  The favoured spot for sledging was at Wallis’s Hollow, opposite the Wheatsheaf, but on a good run you had to jump off to avoid ending up in the brook.  People leaving the pub would join in the fun late into the evening.  The hill on Anstey Lane beyond the church used to be steeper so cars needed to be pushed up it in snowy weather.

Cropston was served by police from Anstey but Thurcaston had its own village policeman, who lived on Leicester Road.  One guest remembered receiving a visit from him after he was caught placing pennies on the railway track to be squashed flat by passing trains.

We heard of some rivalry between the villages – residents of Cropston were thought to look down on Thurcaston – and of a divide (not felt by everyone) according to whether you went to the church or to the chapel.  There is clearly much more to find out, including about the many local clubs and societies, and this event was much enjoyed so we hope to hold another one along similar lines in future.

16 August 2022

You probably know Ashby de la Zouch for its fine main street or perhaps for its castle but here is more to the town that meets the eye, as members of the Society discovered during a visit in August.

We met at the impressive little museum, where Ken Hillier gave an accomplished summary of the town’s history.  The name Ashby implies that it was a Danish settlement.  The Zouch family, which originated from Brittany, supported the Norman invasion and became lords of the manor in about 1150.  Ashby remained an unimportant place until the 1460s, when Edward IV gave control of the Midlands to his friend William Hastings.  Hastings chose to make Ashby his headquarters and built a substantial castle on the site of the former manor house.  The newly important town developed in a distinctive manner, with shops and inns lining Market Street and long, narrow “burgage plots” extending back from them to North Street and South Street.  In the English Civil War, the Hastings family supported the King.  The castle was besieged by Parliamentary forces and eventually surrendered.  The defending force was allowed to leave honourably but the castle was slighted.

The Industrial Revolution largely passed the town by, with developments happening at Swadlincote and Coalville instead, but in about 1800 Ashby unexpectedly became a spa.  There was a brine spring at Moira but, because of nearby coal mines, no-one wanted to visit it there so instead the water was hauled to Ashby in tanks.  The Ivanhoe Baths were built, named after the popular novel by Walter Scott, which had just been published and was partly set in the area.  Although Thomas Cook’s second excursion was from Leicester to Ashby Spa, in the end it was the railways that put an end to the venture by making seaside holidays possible.  Eventually some industry did come to Ashby, including biscuit- and soap-making.  Many of the factory workers and their families were housed in narrow “courts” crammed into the old burgage plots.

Ken led us on a walking tour of the town, where we saw surviving examples of the courts as well as elegant terraces associated with the spa.  We also took detours to pass through the churchyard of St. Helen’s and to view the outside of the castle.  If you haven’t explored the town, it’s well worth the short trip.

21 June 2022

Do you know Every Street in Leicester?  We do! – thanks to the Blue Badge guide Steve Bruce, who led us on a city-centre tour to explore the stories behind Leicester’s street names.

Of course, Every Street runs along one side of Town Hall Square and it was named for the cries of the horse-drawn cab operators that used to ply their trade there.  Steve explained that many of the streets’ names have more obvious origins, for example telling you where they lead to (Humberstone Gate), activities that used to take place there (Horsefair Street), or commemorating people or events that were in the news when someone had to come up with a name (Wellington Street).  Quite often, the people commemorated were the owners of the land the streets were built on.  For example, Bishop Street – also beside Town Hall Square – recalls a Mr Bishop, who owned this area outside the town walls before it began to be developed in the late 1700s.  Another example is the group comprising Rutland Street, Belvoir Street and Granby Street.  They were built on land belonging to the Dukes of Rutland, whose home is at Belvoir Castle and whose heir takes the title Marquess of Granby.

Beware that the obvious explanations are not always correct!  Many of Leicester’s street names end in “Gate” but this usually does not refer to an actual gate.  Instead, it dates from when our area was occupied by Danish settlers, whose Norse word for a road was gatan.  On the other hand, Eastgates (by the Clock Tower), Southgates and Northgate Street do all mark the locations of old gateways into the medieval town.  (The fourth entrance was at West Bridge.)  A short street at the back of the marketplace is called The Jetty but, despite the pub sign of a sailing boat that hung there for many years, the name is probably a corruption of the local word “jitty” meaning a narrow alley.

Street names can reveal the past history of the city.  Silver Street once housed many silversmiths.  Bond Street was formerly called Parchment Lane and both names refer to the manufacture of paper.  Nearby is Butt Close Lane.  Fearing invasion by Catholic powers, Elizabeth I ordered that all men and boys should practise archery each week and this street was close to site of the archery butts.

The tour was titled “Who put the Cank in Cank Street?” and Steve offered us a choice of explanations.  It might refer to the “kink” along the length of the road.  There was also a Cank Well there – the site being marked by a small brick in the pavement outside the entrance to St. Martin’s Square – so the name could be connected to the Cornish word for a water channel or to a Yorkshire dialect term for the gossiping that probably would have gone on in the queue!

Steve provided lots of fascinating information beside the snippets here, which will add interest to future visits to Leicester, and many of his examples can also be applied to other places.  We hope he will lead us on a different tour next summer so look out for that!

17 May 2022

At our May meeting, we welcomed back Bob Trubshaw to discuss the intriguing subject of how Anglo-Saxons found their way.  Bob is a writer and publisher on various subjects that are ancient, mystical or mysterious, as well as the instigator of Project Gargoyle to document the medieval church carvings of Leicestershire and Rutland.

Anglo-Saxon settlers began to arrive from mainland Europe not long after Roman rule here had ended.  The kingdoms that they founded eventually united to create England, and their culture and the Old English language remained dominant until the time of the Norman Conquest.  Anglo-Saxon people needed to travel for reasons including trade, pilgrimage and war but they did not have maps, so how did they find their way?

One possible answer comes from studies of English place-names, the majority of which are Anglo-Saxon in origin.  This includes names that end in -ham (related to “home”) or -ton (related to “town”).  Both those words meant a settlement, with a tendency for -ham­ places to be more pastoral and -ton places to be more arable.  Many place-names, including Cropston and Thurcaston, referred to individuals but others are descriptive of landscape features.  Research by Margaret Gelling and others has demonstrated that those descriptions can be extremely specific.  For example, there were at least 20 different words for “hill”, depending on whether the hill was round (-don), steep-sided (cliff or edge), a ridge dipping at the end (over), “heel-shaped” with a high and a low summit (ho- or hough-), wooded (hurst) or artificial (barrow or -low).  There were similar ranges of words for types of valley, woods, water features, etc.  Other names referred to the former Roman occupation so anywhere called Stretton will be near a Roman road (street), while places with names ending -chester, -cester or -xeter will be on the site of a Roman town.

In the opinion of Bob and others, these descriptions were specific enough for travellers to have found a route from one place to the next.  He has identified that you could still travel from Great Glen, south of Leicester, to Thistleton on the Lincolnshire border, passing only through villages that have descriptive Old English names.  Although we have no evidence of Anglo-Saxon journeys being planned in this way, there are surviving documents that define the boundaries of estates by reference to a series of landscape features.  The main difficulty for travellers would have been to remember the sequence of places.  It is likely that the Anglo-Saxons used stories or songs to link them together in a memorable way, similar to the “song lines” of Aboriginal Australia or the traditional stories of Traveller communities.  There is more detail about these ideas in a written version of Bob’s talk, which is online at http://www.hoap.co.uk/hasftw.pdf.

15 February 2022

You have probably seen the gated development called Guild Close in Cropston but have you ever wondered why it has that name?  At our February meeting, Jane Smith explained that from 1925 to 1992, the Leicester Guild of the Crippled operated a holiday home on the site.  Despite having a name that is objectionable by modern standards, the Guild was pioneering in the support that it gave to disabled people in the early part of the 20^th century, long before there was any welfare state to provide for them.

The Guild was formed in 1898 and initially ran social evenings for disabled people at the Bishop Street Methodist Church in Leicester.  Many such people had previously been bed-ridden and kept out of sight at home but they came to the events by whatever means they could, and the Guild would provide crutches, wheelchairs and spinal carriages for those in need.  In 1909 the Guild opened its own Guild Hall on Colton Street, which was one of the first buildings in the country to be designed for disabled access.  There, it was able to offer religious services, concerts, slide shows and classes such as artificial flower making, which enabled the members to earn an income.  An Honorary Surgeon gave advice on treatment.  There were rail excursions to the seaside, largely funded by factory workers, while in the early days of motoring the well-to-do members of the Leicestershire Automobile Club arranged outings by road.

(You can find footage of classic cars collecting passengers from the Guild Hall at the MACE Archive).

In 1923, the Guild bought the site in Cropston from the estate of Sarah Jane Hind and the holiday home was opened 2 years later.  From each Easter to Christmas, it offered free accommodation to Guild members, who were looked after by a matron and a small staff.  The home had a garden with views of Bradgate Park and a summerhouse that could be rotated according to the weather.  Many groups from local villages would raise funds for the home or provide volunteers, entertainment or other support to residents.  Among them were Anstey Toc H, the Mothers’ Union, Cropston Sewing Circle, Thurcaston Flower Arranging Class and the handbell ringers.  The home also had close links with Cropston Chapel.  This was often the Guild members’ only chance of a holiday: they would return to the home every year and were very appreciative of the care they received there.

During the 1980s, the Guild faced financial hardship because of rising costs.  The limitations of transport and parking at Colton Street became a problem and there was reduced demand for holidays in Cropston as wider opportunities became available for disabled people.  A plan was made to demolish the holiday home and build new headquarters, respite accommodation and sheltered housing on the site, to be paid for by the sale of the Guild Hall.  However, no buyer could be found so in 1995 it was reluctantly decided to sell the Cropston site instead.  The land was bought by David Wilson Homes, who used it to build the 12 private dwellings that we see today.

Following a merger and several changes of name, the Guild is now called Mosaic 1898.  It continues its work providing advocacy, support, opportunities and care for disabled people in Leicestershire.

15 March 2022

There are close links between Thurcaston and Belgrave, the two villages having been directly connected by road until the route was diverted along Beaumont Leys Lane in the 1990s.  At the Society’s March meeting, our member Nick Fathers took us back several generations earlier, on a photographic and historical tour entitled “Welcome to Belgrave”.  Nick’s explanations were enlivened – not to say upstaged – by the contemporary opinions of Mrs Sarah Billington, landlady of the Bull’s Head, who was conjured up for us by Sandra Moore.

The talk was illustrated with a fine collection of photographs of Belgrave at different periods.  Some came from postcards, like the example here that provided Nick’s title.  It was one of many local scenes published by the postmaster Walter Clayton.  Other photographs came from a collection of glass negatives and were so well preserved that Nick was able to zoom in and show details of children’s faces and of goods for sale in the shop windows.

Until the mid-19^th century, Belgrave was a small, self-contained village centred on its hall, church, village green and the medieval bridge on Thurcaston Road.  Then, from a population of 1200 in 1845, it rapidly grew six-fold as people moved from the countryside to find work in factories in and around Leicester.  The grand houses along Loughborough Road show that the area first became a fashionable suburb but before long all the spaces in between were filled with the rows of terraced housing that we see today.  To support the greater population, there was a wide variety of shops and an extraordinary number of pubs and alehouses.  That might explain the building of a subtantial police station, which survives but is no longer in use.  The small village school close to the river was replaced by the National School – known as the “Nashy” – on the corner of Thurcaston Road.  This was the terminus of the tram line from Leicester and a tram shed survived nearby until quite recently.

Other interesting pictures showed:

• The “Old Tree”, an elm that stood for many years outside the Talbot Inn and was the main meeting place in the village.
• The Green at the bottom of Bath Lane, which was flooded in 1912.
• A venue for pleasure boating next to the bridge.

Piecemeal development through the 20^th century has destroyed much of the character of Belgrave but there are still things of historical interest to spot if you know where to look!  From April, the Belgrave Heritage Trust will have photos and other information on display at Belgrave Hall, each Wednesday and on the first weekend of each month, so that would be a good time to go and explore the area for yourself.

18 January 2022

In the last couple of years, many of us have made more use of our local network of footpaths.  Perhaps that explains the good number of members and visitors who attended our meeting in January to hear from Vicky Allen, President of the Leicestershire & Rutland Bridleways Association, about the history of rights of way.

In ancient times, the easiest way to transport people and goods was by water – but as it didn’t always flow where you needed to go, roads of various kinds have always been necessary.  Some of those ancient routes may be the oldest man-made features to survive in the landscape.  The Romans famously built good, straight roads, which continued to be used long after the Roman occupation.  Their technology was not improved on until the scientific advances of Telford and Macadam in the 1800s.

In the right conditions, the early roads made it possible to travel quite rapidly: for example, Richard II was able to ride 70 miles along Watling Street in one night, with only a single change of horse.  However, in wet weather routes over Leicestershire clay could become “foundrous”, meaning bad enough to bring a horse to its knees.  In some cases, horses were better off following the bed of a brook, while lighter pedestrians would walk alongside.  Individual parishes were made responsible for maintaining the roads that passed through them but they often failed to comply.  Although the responsibility has now passed to county councils, parishes do still retain some rights of veto in highways matters.

Richard II’s journey shows that, in medieval times, even kings would travel on horseback, while peasants would go on foot and goods would be transported by packhorse.  There was also a network of drove roads across the country, along which herds of cattle and sheep would be driven from Wales, Scotland and the North of England to be sold in the South-East, grazing along the way.  Pub names such as the Durham Ox and the Black Bull might indicate a drove road, as might wide verges and clumps of Scots pines, which were planted to mark favourable stopping places.

County maps did not begin to show roads until about 1600 and, even then, the maps were for display by the gentry, not for practical route-finding.  Later in the century, writers such as Celia Fiennes made travelling fashionable and strip maps began to be published showing the routes between principal towns.  In the 1700s, turnpike trusts built better roads funded by tolls and it became practical to make journeys by carriage.  Surveying also improved and the military established the Ordnance Survey to plan the movement of guns (ordnance) in the threat of invasion.  At the end of the century, parliamentary enclosure transferred large areas of the countryside into private ownership and established the distinction between roads, bridleways and footpaths for the first time.

The 19^th century landscape movement, which led to the founding of organizations such as the National Trust, increased interest in preserving footpaths.  In 1850 the artist John Flower – who painted in both Thurcaston and Cropston – set up the Leicestershire Footpaths Association, which went on to publish comprehensive maps of paths in the county.  The new pastime of cycling gave rise to its own maps, with routes marked in different ways to show the quality of the surface.

Rights of way in the countryside (but not in cities) are now recorded in Definitive Maps.  A recent law has set a deadline of January 2026 for any new claims based on historic rights to be submitted and a huge number of them is expected.  However, after many years of campaigning to re-establish historic bridleways on the routes of footpaths, Vicky has concluded that the distinction should be abolished.  She advocates “greenways” that can be used by all non-motorized traffic, with the money saved in legal fees being used to educate users and landowners to share them responsibly.

16 November 2021

After completing the formal business of the AGM at our November meeting,
we rewarded ourselves with entertainment from the Leicestershire Guild of Storytelling, in the person of Kathy Chalk.  The Guild has been collecting and re-telling local stories for over 25 years.  Some of them are unique to Leicestershire and Rutland, while others are local versions of tales that are known around the world, from collections such as The One Thousand and One Nights.

Kathy first told us about the rector of Ratby, who fell out with the local squire over a matter of conscience and came to a soggy reckoning in Groby Pool.

Next, she recounted the history of our own Hugh Latimer, who progressed from being the son of a Thurcaston farmer to become a famous preacher and Bishop of Worcester.  However, he ended his days being burned at the stake in Oxford under the reforms of the Catholic queen Mary Tudor.

On a lighter note, there was Jack, who travelled from London to visit Leicester market and tried to take advantage – in more ways than one – of local girl Bella.  However, he got more than he bargained for when he returned a year later!  This story achieved national fame by being circulated in print as one of the “broadside ballads”.

Kathy’s final tale was of Dan Hugh: a monk in one of Leicester’s friaries, who was murdered three times in the same night and a pike was eventually hanged for the crime.  To find out why, you’ll have to seek out the Guild’s book Leicestershire & Rutland Folk Tales, which includes this story and many more.

19 October 2021

There is always a good turn-out when we can find truly local topics for our meetings and that was again the case in October, when two of our long-standing members updated us with their research into some of the most significant buildings in Thurcaston’s history.

First, we heard from Margaret Greiff about the largest house in the village, which has been known successively as the Mansion House, the Rectory and the Grange.  Strictly speaking, Thurcaston was never a manor in its own right but was a tenancy of the manor of Groby, with a requirement to pay rent in the form of a certain number of hens each year at Candlemas.  However, the tenant behaved as the lord of the manor in practice.  Margaret presented a case that the Mansion House was originally built soon after 1276, when John Falconer of Keyham married the heiress to the Thurcaston estate.  His name appears in legal documents connected with Thurcaston from that time and he might also have been responsible for improvements in the church that have been dated to the 13^th century, such as the addition of a tower and the north aisle.

The house probably became the Rectory in the mid-1400s, when the Falconer family lacked a male heir and the ownership of Thurcaston passed with one of their daughters to a family in Staffordshire.  In 1583, Elizabeth I’s spymaster Francis Walsingham bought the Thurcaston estate and gave it to the newly founded Emmanuel College in Cambridge.  We are fortunate that several of the rectors appointed by Emmanuel have left us descriptions of the Rectory.  For a long time, it remained a large, half-timbered hall of 8 bays, open to the roof, which would have been similar in size and appearance to Leicester Guildhall.  It was not until 1735 that the Rev. Arnald substantially rebuilt the property in brick, with many sash windows and the attractive curved frontage that it retains today.

By 1927, much of the glebe land attached to the Rectory had been sold and it became too expensive for the rector to maintain.  A new rectory was built further along Anstey Lane and the old Rectory was renamed the Grange.  It has since passed through a succession of private owners and Margaret showed us several photographs taken by Zoe Byford, who grew up there.

Next, Brenda Hooper told us the story of Thurcaston’s lost Manor House.  There is a well-known painting by the Leicester artist John Flower of “an old house at Thurcaston” but until recently it was not clear exactly where it was located.  Then Brenda and Margaret discovered a watercolour in the collection of Leicester Museums, which shows the same building from a different angle and makes clear that it stood just behind the church.  The house was large, with three gables, and an inscription on a beam recorded that it was built in 1568 by Nicholas Gravenor.  However, it can be seen from the Flower painting that in fact he must have added two new gables to an earlier building.  (The earlier building was potentially old enough to have been the birthplace of the protestant martyr Hugh Latimer in 1487.  The other contender is the house roughly opposite the Memorial Hall that is still known as Latimer House.)

Gravenor did not live in his new house for long, soon building and moving into an even grander house with a moat, at Maplewell.  There are occasional later references to the Manor House from records such as Hearth Tax returns and we know that from at least 1770 it belonged to the Hudson and Palmer families of Wanlip Hall.  For more than 100 years their tenants were farmers called Weston.  In 1852, lightning set fire to the roof of the house and the Leicester newspapers praised the people of Thurcaston and surrounding villagers for the way they worked together to save the building and its contents.  The house was eventually dismantled in the 1870s, when Archdale Palmer built a new “Thurcaston Manor” for his widowed mother on the other side of the church, which survives today.

22 September 2021

How should society support those of its members who are unable to support themselves?  With the news full of controversies around Universal Credit and issues of food and fuel poverty, the question is relevant today but it has a long history and was the subject of our September meeting.  Our experienced speaker was Mick Rawle, President of the Leicestershire & Rutland Family History Society, and he illustrated his talk with many original documents, including some drawn from the history of his own family.

Mick explained how the “Old” Poor Law was enacted in 1597 and continued in force with little amendment for nearly 250 years.  It required each parish to take responsibility for its own poor, to prevent the infirm from starving and to provide employment for those who were able to work.  Each parish appointed Overseers of the Poor, whose expenses were funded by a rate levied on the wealthier members of the community.  When someone fell into poverty, it became very important to establish which parish must take responsibility for them and there are many records of “settlement examinations” to answer that question.  Usually, a person was deemed to be settled in the last place where they had lived or worked for more than a year and they could be sent back there (with their family) to claim poor relief.  Considerable efforts were also made to obtain payments from the fathers of illegitimate children to avoid the children becoming a burden on the parish.  When the parish did have to care for children, they were often placed into long apprenticeships instead, for example from the age of 8 until 21.

Surviving Overseers’ account books show that at certain periods caring for the poor became a great expense for the community.  One such period was just after the Napoleonic Wars, when soldiers returned home looking for work at the same time as industry and agriculture were depressed because of the ending of the war effort.  An increasing share of the poor rate was being paid to lawyers to argue settlement cases and it became clear that the law needed to change.

In 1834 the “New” Poor Law established a different system, in which groups of parishes were joined into Poor Law Unions with a shared workhouse.  Thurcaston and Cropston were part of the Barrow Union and the workhouse was in Mount­sorrel.  While each parish still paid for its own poor, the larger workhouses were more efficient and better regulated.  Mick’s opinion was that, although designed to be places where citizens would want to avoid ending up, the workhouses did a lot of good in keeping people going until they could resume gainful employment.

It was good to be back together in the Memorial Hall – suitably distanced – after such a long break.

20 July 2021

For our July event we were once more able to meet in person to explore the neighbouring village of Swithland.  Our chair, Anne Horton, had prepared a “treasure trail” with a series of 20 questions that drew our attention to some of the many listed buildings and other interesting features of the village.

After a brief detour to see the station-that-might-have-been, we gathered in the churchyard, where Anne was very much at home, having been Rector of the parish for many years.  Many of the graves to be seen there are carved from the famous Swithland slate so they are extremely well preserved.  They range from the elaborate tomb of Sir John Danvers to two modest but very early headstones from 1673.  A campaign by parishioners successfully resulted in the medieval font being returned from Scotland and it now stands close to the East Door.

Anne also arranged for us to visit the historic Hall Farm, where we peeked inside one of the two 18^th century barns and admired its timber roof.

The remainder of the trail followed Main Street, where the village school and many of the old cottages were built or restored by the Danvers family of Swithland Hall.  A heraldic symbol of the family was the wyvern – a kind of dragon without hind legs – and its image can be seen in various places.  The Wyvern was also the original name of the village pub but through time it became corrupted to the Griffin Inn.  We ended our tour at the war memorial and the adjoining Memorial Hall, where a plaque was placed in the year 2000 to commemorate the many generations of local people who worked in the slate industry.

17  August 2021

You have probably seen the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory beside the A512 near Thringstone.  A cold and dull August evening did not deter 16 of our members and their guests from joining us on a guided walk to take a closer look at them.

Ann Petty from the Friends of Grace Dieu led us through pleasant woods to the gates of Grace Dieu Manor, was used until recently as a private school.  Ann had grown up in one of the houses on the estate so she was able to give us a personal insight into life there during the 1960s.  Our further route to the priory ruins passed the remains of the old Charnwood Forest Canal and Railway, which were built to connect the Leicestershire coalfields to Loughborough but they were never very profitable.

The Priory was founded by Rosa de Verdon in about the year 1240, when she returned to her home town of Belton after an unhappy marriage in Ireland.  It followed the standard plan of a simple church on the north side, with other buildings grouped around a cloister.  The Priory housed up to 16 Augustinian nuns, a number of servants and a male priest to conduct the many services that formed their daily routine.  Rosa herself might also have lived there; she was certainly buried at the Priory when she died a few years later and her fine tomb can still be seen in Belton church.  There is a standing stone in an adjacent field and many worked flints have also been found at the site so the location of the Priory was perhaps chosen because of its existing spiritual significance.

We get occasional glimpses of life at the Priory through church records, legal disputes and a rare set of account books for the years 1414-1418.  Its estates gradually grew as people left land to it in their wills but it never became very wealthy.  The Priory continued in use for 300 years until, like other religious houses, it was dissolved during the reign of Henry VIII.  John Beaumont was assigned to value the property for the Crown and the next day he bought it for the low price he had determined!  (Beaumont had form: later in life he was imprisoned for corruption on a grand scale in the position of Master of the Rolls.)  The Beaumonts converted the Priory into a family home and most of the ruins visible today date from that Tudor period but the broad arch of the medieval Chapter House remains the most distinctive feature.

The estate eventually came into the Phillipps family.  Their main residence was at Garendon and they allowed Grace Dieu to fall into ruin but a later member of the family, Ambrose Phillipps De Lisle, built himself a new manor house on the estate.  He was a prominent local Catholic, founding Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, and he built several chapels and other religious monuments in the woods around Grace Dieu.  After De Lisle moved back to Garendon, a long-term tenant of the Manor was Charles Booth, known for his maps of poverty in Victorian London, who was a generous benefactor to the local area and is buried at Thringstone.

If you would like to visit, the Friends of Grace Dieu offer tours at various times during the year or you can explore on your own by following the signed footpath from the car park of the Bull’s Head carvery at Thringstone.