The road to Rutland by motorcycle
(Listen to audio on Wheels from Ivy Cottage podcast)
I turned right off the A427, just to the east of the A6 Market Harborough bypass, picking up the B664 northeastwards, on a similar course to the River Welland.
The road then cuts out a wide bend in the river, passing straight over high ground between the spring line villages of Sutton Bassett and Weston by Welland.
The high ground here is an outlier of the iron infused Jurrassic limestone, formerly quarried further east to feed the furnaces of steelworks at Corby.
It is the iron that gives the rich golden hue to the stone in the cottages and churches that I passed through, village to village. These villages offer visual delights only surpassed by the beauty of the undulating landscape, as the road descends to cross the River Welland and its flood plain, to rise once more after Medbourne, only to descend once more to Stockerston, after which it crosses the Eye Brook over a narrow humpbacked bridge.
Crossing the Welland I passed over the ancient boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. Crossing the Eye Brook, I passed an equally historic boundary between Leicestershire and Rutland.
Once in Rutland, I climbed steeply out of the Eye valley via two dramatic doglegs on the King's Hill, after which the Jurassic uplands plateau out, appropriately enough around the hilltop town of Uppingham.
Out of Uppingham, I rode northwards through the hill country between Uppingham and Melton Mowbray, passing through the villages of Ayston, Ridlington, Brooke (where I pulled up to look at the old Brooke Priory, and its ancient earthworks, the evidence for a minor house of Augustinian monks), Braunston-in-Rutland, Owston, Newbold and Burrough on the Hill. The latter village's name means 'fortification on the hill’; and sure enough, Burrough Hill, an Iron Age hillfort rises up near the village on a promontory 690 feet above sea level, commanding views over the surrounding countryside for miles around.
I picnicked beside the little lane to Great Dalby, between the hillfort and Salter’s Hill, on a bridleway which might well have been an old salt way in ages past.
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
Being: what is it?
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Just a thought:
The demand for freedom has been falsely posed and inorganically answered with church and anti-church universalisms, an unholy alliance of media-promoted cultural Marxism, liberal individualism, democracy and internationalism, policed under a world state. All peoples have to submit themselves to these gods of borderless chaos, unrestricted central banking and financial speculation. Jehovianism in its guise of church or anti-church, cultural Marxism and the stock exchange has destroyed personality and will. Its priesthood has decreed that contentment is the order of the day. John Dunn (Renaissance: Counter-Renaissance)
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