John Dunn

Rothley Saxon Cross

Thursday, 11 June 2026 at 12:12

Rothley Saxon Cross

In the distance, glimpses of the beautiful spire of Queniborough’s church, considered by Pevsner to be "one of the finest spires in the whole of Leicestershire”. It’s certainly the tallest.

Over the Queniborough Brook, and beyond that, Queniborough’s high street, a designated conservation area; and three cheers for that, given the rich mix of 16th to 20th-century properties - the classic brick cottages, painted facades, and thatched rooves. A joy to ride through.

The target of my ride has brought me along this lovely High Street; a ride to an ancient remnant of the pre-conquest Saxon kingdom of Mercia, located in Rothley, north of Leicester.

Even on the more recently built edges of Queniborough there’s history to be found. A short stretch of road beyond the High Street stops at a T junction. This is where I join an old turnpike established in 1764, connecting Melton Mowbray and Leicester. It later became the A607, until bypassed in 1992.

Having turned right at that T, I am now heading west on the by-pass, and even here there’s history to be found. Beyond East Goscote, I meet an ordinary looking roundabout. But what marks this one out as a little special is that it stands on the Roman Fosse Way, a road that was already hundreds of years old when the Saxons arrived in Rothley.

Over the River Soar, under today’s A6, to make an error at the cross roads which follow. In my haste to find a right turn I turned right too early. My error was to turn on to the old route of the A6 before Rothley and Moutsorrel were both bypassed. At this point it was once the Market Harborough and Loughborough Turnpike, established in 1726. Soon back on my planned route in Rothley, I was looking for the correct right turn on to Anthony Street, which would lead me to Church Street.

Rothley lies in the heart of what was Mercia, the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom that dominated central England from the 7th to early 9th centuries. Evidence points to Rothley being a significant local settlement with ecclesiastical and manorial functions in the late Saxon period. And a key piece of that evidence is what I’ve come to see here in the churchyard of St Mary and St John’s.

The Rothley Cross, a well-preserved Anglo-Saxon cross shaft, dated to the late 8th to mid-9th century - in other words pre-Viking in the Mercian context. Made from millstone grit (likely from Derbyshire), it features intricate carvings including interlaced plait-work, plant scrolls, foliage, and possibly a winged beast/dragon. It is one of only two near-complete early examples in the East Midlands and reflects Mercian artistic styles.

The cross was probably associated with Saxon Rothley church’s role as a minster - a mother church serving a large parish territory with subordinate chapels. The surviving Saxon cross remains a tangible link to that era.

© John Dunn.

Buckden on the old Great North Road, the old A1

Thursday, 11 June 2026 at 12:06

Houses at Shortstown

The model villages of Bedfordshire

Shortstown owes its existence to Short Brothers. In 1916 the Admiralty selected the site near Cardington for an airship works. Shorts was awarded the contract and began constructing facilities in 1917, including a large airship shed (No. 1 Shed), a factory, hydrogen plant, foundry, and rolling mill. To house the workforce, Shorts built a planned housing estate in the emerging Garden City style opposite the works.

In the 1920s, the Stewart family led the London Brick Company. Constructionof a planned Garden City-style model village for employees began in 1926. It featured houses, schools, a village hall, sports grounds, and community facilities—similar to Bournville but on more modern Garden City principles. The village was named Stewartby in honour of the Stewart family.

Old Warden has deep medieval roots. However, in the early 19th century, the 3rd Lord Ongley began to develop Old Warden as a model estate village in the “picturesque” style. Many of the attractive thatched cottages date from or were enhanced during this period, reflecting benevolent landlordism and a desire to create an idyllic landscape.

© John Dunn.

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Wednesday, 10 June 2026 at 22:55

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Buckden on the old Great North Road, the old A1

Saturday, 2 May 2026 at 20:40

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Buckden on the old Great North Road, the old A1

I ride along Buckden's high street, down which used to pass the Great North Road, the A1, until bypassed in 1962.

Buckden in Huntingdonshire (now a district of Cambridgeshire), prospered in the18th and 19th centuries as a key stop on the Great North Road for mail coaches, stagecoaches, and private travellers between London and Edinburgh.

I note the many coaching inns which vied for the business of stage coach operators and the cash of the passengers.

This traffic, and the employment that went with it, were lost with the coming of the railways, but it returned with motor traffic - at first a trickle of pioneering motorists and motor-bicyclists. The trickle became a torrent, revitalising the village with travellers seeking fuel and refreshment, until Buckden was choked with traffic, to be eventually bypassed in 1962.

I linger awhile at Buckden’s most prominent landmark, Buckden Palace, which was frequented by kings, queens and bishops over the centuries.

I take a look inside another ancient landmark, the church of St Mary, and wonder at a medieval band of instrumentalists and singers.

All in all. a short stretch of road with a long road-related history.

Motorcycle: Honda CB500F
Pictured: The George and Lion in the early days of motoring.

© John Dunn.

Honey Hill in February

Sunday, 5 April 2026 at 21:31

Honey Hill in February

The newly turned wind was in the west and brisk. During my pause in woodland near Welford, two calls predominated. First, the call of the trees, a frenzied call of rattling dead leaves still clinging to the bough, of others racing along the path like rats behind the piper, or twisting up like animated ghosts, only to fall again and dissipate, of dead boughs grinding and creaking, of supple young growth lashing, of finer twigs soughing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming in one symphonic crescendo; and through this cacophony, the ever-present chaos of the Robin’s call.

I cycled from the River Welland at 423 feet to Honey Hill near Cold Ashby, on a level with the Trig Point at 689. A bridleway off the lane was too inviting to turn down, and so turn down it I did. A named right-of-way, this the Jurassic Way was gravelled at the outset, keeping me above the mud and pools resulting from months of interminable winter rain. I knew that this luxury would only likely last as far as the house I could see across the field, but that would be enough to allow me to cycle to a point where I could view the wide open valley promised by the OS Map.

Sun and wind danced together in the clouds, but for once without rain. Larks sang over the dark heavy waterlogged earth. The dead drab grasses waved at the feet of the hedgerows. Little pools at the track-side brought the sky down to the dark earth. Shapeless rags of snow-grey clouds wandered up from the west and for a short while obscured the white mountains of cloud, the blue sky, the hazy sun.

Shortly after the house, the view opened up before me. Looking down from the Jurassic height of Honey Hill I saw the wide vale of the Avon and its tributaries, this being the westward side of the Avon-Welland watershed. To the south west I saw the Jurassic heights, sliced in twain by the Watford Gap, with Barby Hill beyond. To the north west, the high land of Dunsmoor lay prostrate and violet through fifteen miles of witching air.

© John Dunn.

The landscape of my present

Saturday, 14 March 2026 at 02:14

The deep dark woodland; the haunt of foxes

The landscape of my present

It took a low gear to keep me cycling up the hill out of Cottesbrooke towards Creaton. At the summit the view up ahead to my left drew me to a lane-side pause.

What caught my eye first was the curving, swooping edge to a defined swathe of woodland at the opposite side of the shallow valley formed, over centuries, by a narrow tributary of the River Nene. Creaton Covert, the name of the wood tells of the reason forits planting about one hundred and fifty years ago, possibly more, which was to nurture the population of foxes hereabouts. For the countryside I surveyed before me has long been hunting territory, and has been shaped by the sport.

The hill I had climbed gave me sweeping views to the horizon where, beyond the bounded wood, I could make out the spire of the great Saxon church of Brixworth, in its day the greatest building north of the Alps, dignifying the hilltop stronghold of the Mercian kings.

Almost monochrome, the colours laid out before me were predominantly deep green, apart from the wood, which was a green so deep it fell into near-black. I had ridden through fields of ancient ridge and furrow, but now the predominant impression was one of criss-crossing enclosure hedges.

Dark earthy leaf-mould, green pasture, deep dark woodland, the haunt of foxes, these were the textures and colours of that moment. But there was depth beyond immediate sensory experience. I was mindful of the generations who had passed this way before. These people and their necessary tasks, building, ditching, draining, hedge-laying, these people and the search for transcendence through the thrill of the chase, they were all preparing the landscape of my present.

© John Dunn.

Saxons on Sulby Road

Monday, 9 February 2026 at 19:38

Experimental Archaeology at the Viking ship museum in Roskilde. The Saxon river boats would have been much smaller, but similar principles apply

Saxons on Sulby Road

(Listen to audio on Wheels from Ivy Cottage podcast, on Apple, Spotify etc)

I cycled southwards, along Sulby Road. An ancient Road, which centuries ago was chosen as the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, taking up the role temporarily abandoned by the rivers Welland and Avon. Sulby Road in fact crosses the watershed between the two. At the time of the embryonic Saxon shires, or shares of land, the Midlands were an area of dense and near-impenetrable woodland. Boat travel along rivers was the principal and often only means of transport across country. Travel West-East at this point would have meant hauling a boat out of the Avon and dragging it on sleds and rollers over the watershed and into the Welland. Sulby Road, then a track in the woodland, may have witnessed the tortuously slow progress of such boat-haulings. Did Offa and the other Mercian kings pass this way as they traversed their Saxon realm.

Having passed through Welford, I headed towards South Kilworth, dropping down the steep contours of Downtown Hill from 554 feet at the roadside trig point, to 52 feet in the Avon Valley below. After first crossing the Grand Union Canal, the next bridge is over the River Avon. Were the Saxon’s boats dropped back into the water here after the long haul from the Welland, or did they manage the feat higher up at Welford? What does remain of the Saxons here is the county boundary between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire,a duty falling upon the Avon, as fulfilled by the Welland over the other side of the watershed.

To the left of the bridge over the Avon, the river has been dammed back as Stanford reservoir, named after the nearby village.The reservoir was built in 1928 and, as the Leicestershire & Rutland Ornithological Society tells us on its website, lies on an imaginary line drawn between the Wash and the Severn, a proven ‘flyway’ for migrating birds across the centre of England.

That proven flyway follows the same trajectory as the proven waterway followed by the Saxons, the Welland flowing from the Wash in the East, the Avon flowing to the Severn in the West, but with this arduous overland connection up and over the watershed.

© John Dunn.