Leicestershire Villages: C
There are 23 villages in Leicestershire beginning with ‘C’, and over the last few years I’ve walked to or from all of them. Here’s a snippet about each. (For those who missed them, the ‘A’s are here and the ‘B’s here).
39. Cadeby, north of Hinckley. The Rev Teddy Boston, rector here until his death in 1986, was a railway enthusiast and great friend of Rev W Awdry - he was the inspiration for one of the clergymen in Thomas the Tank Engine. He built a narrow gauge railway in the rectory garden.
40. Carlton Curlieu, south-east of Leicester. The name comes from the Old English ‘ceorl’ (freeman of the lower class, peasant) & ‘tun’ (enclosure, village, estate). The feudal affix Curlieu is the family name of William de Curley, who held the manor in 1253.
41. Carlton, 14 miles west of Leicester. There has been a church here since the early C13th, though this building is a 1764 rebuild after a fire. It was then altered and gothicised in 1867, when the saddleback top was added to the tower and the dedication changed, to St Andrew.
42. Castle Donington, in the far north-west of the county. East Midlands Airport, which opened in 1965 on the site of the former RAF Castle Donington (which had been built in 1943), is just to the south, and in 2022 was the 14th busiest airport in the UK.
43. Catthorpe, in the far south-west of the county. The River Avon (‘Avon’ means ‘river’) is quite small as it passes just south of the village. East of here it partly forms the Leicestershire/Northamptonshire county border. To the west it flows through Stratford-upon-Avon and eventually joins the Severn.
44. Chadwell, NE of Melton, means 'spring/stream which is cold'. Chadwell was in the Hundred (county division) of Framland; the Domesday Book called Leicestershire Hundreds ‘Wapentakes’, reflecting Danish influence. (The church is structurally unsafe, so is currently fenced off).
45. Chilcote, in the far west of the county near the short border with Staffordshire, was part of an exclave of Derbyshire until 1897. Even now, it is impossible to go by road from the village to anywhere else in Leicestershire without going into Derbyshire or Warwickshire first.
46. Church Langton, north of Market Harborough. The first performance of Handel's Messiah in a parish church in England took place here, shortly after the composer’s death in 1759. The performance was so popular it caused traffic jams of carriages in the area and filled local inns.
.47. Claybrooke Magna & 48. Claybrooke Parva, neighbouring villages in the SW of the county, near where Roman Watling Street met Fosse Way. St Peter’s church has a medieval mass dial, and deep grooves in one of the windows, thought to be from centuries of locals sharpening arrows. [Supplementary note: the ‘Arrow Stone’ theory is discussed and challenged here.]
49. Cold Overton, near the Rutland border, west of Oakham. ‘Overton’ means farmstead or village on the ridge, and the prefix ‘Cald’ means bleak or exposed. There are fragile, once-hidden sections of C12th medieval paintings on the south and east walls of the church.
50. Coleorton, north-west of Coalville. Coleorton Colliery no. 3, open from 1875 to 1933, was known as the ‘Bug n’ Wink’ - supposedly because the miners thought the owners were humbugging & hoodwinking them when calculating their wages. The church is a mile west of the village.
51. Congerstone, north-west of Market Bosworth. Charles Jennens (1700-73), who was brought up and lived at nearby Gopsall Hall (now demolished), was a friend and patron of Handel, who regularly visited the Hall. Jennens provided libretti for many of Handel’s works, notably the Messiah.
96. Copt Oak, north-west of Leicester. St Peter’s Church, consecrated on 3 September 1837, was designed by William Railton (1800-77). He also designed Copt Oak’s identical twin church in Woodhouse Eaves to the east, which was consecrated 2 days later, & Nelson’s Column in London.1
52. Cosby, south of Leicester. Legend has it that Brooks Edge, a C17th house by the church in Cosby, was where Civil War Parliamentarians interrogated the son of the Royalist Armston family, celebrated in WF Yearns’ famous C19th painting ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’
53. Cossington, north of Leicester. John Webster, who was briefly Governor of the Colony of Connecticut in 1656, was born here in 1590. One of his descendants was Noah Webster, the lexicographer whose ‘American Dictionary of the English Language’ was first published in 1828.
54. Coston, east of Melton. In 1535 a rector of Coston left 6s 8d (33p) in his will for the church’s rood screen to be gilded. In 1646 a later rector who had spent the Civil War at Belvoir Castle was fined £70 for spying on and plotting against Parliamentary supporters, and employing ‘scandalous curates’.
55. Cotesbach, south of Lutterworth. In May 1607 there was a large anti-enclosure protest in Cotesbach, reputedly involving 5,000 people from neighbouring towns and counties, who cut down hedges and filled in ditches of formerly common land. But by 1612 the land had been re-enclosed.
56. Countesthorpe, south of Leicester. The “Countes” part of the name is said to derive from the Countess Judith of Lens, niece of William the Conqueror, who was a major landowner in Leicestershire. Stocking knitting became a key local cottage industry from the first half of the C18th.
57. Cranoe, north of Market Harborough, has a ‘freelance’ role in the annual Easter Monday bottle-kicking contest between the nearby villages of Hallaton and Medbourne: it helps whichever side is losing until the last minute, when it switches (if necessary) to the winning side.
58. Croft, south-west of Leicester. In 836AD King Wiglaf of Mercia presided over a Council at Croft Hill, and signed a charter witnessed by his Queen Cynethryth, the Archbishop of Canterbury, bishops, abbots and others, which granted land to the monastery of Hanbury in Worcestershire.
59. Cropston, just north west of Leicester. Cropston reservoir, lying between the village & Bradgate Park to its west, was completed in 1871 at a cost of £142,000, to serve the growing town of Leicester, which had suffered several cholera epidemics over the previous decades. (This is Thurcaston with Cropston church.)
60. Croxton Kerrial, south of Belvoir Castle. Little trace remains of the once important Croxton Abbey. In the C13th its abbot was physician to King John, who died at Newark in 1216. His heart was buried under the abbey’s altar, and his son, Henry III, bestowed gifts upon Croxton in memory of his father.
So that’s 61 villages down and 210 to go. I’ll post the link to the ‘D’s and ‘E’s here when I get round to doing them.
A late addition (which is why it’s numbered out of sequence). I missed previously that this hamlet has a church, so I wanted to include it.