A1-The Great North Road
"There are only three main roads, the Great North Road, the Kettering to Nottingham road, and the Birmingham-Great Yarmouth Trunk Road, to bring the stink of petrol and the unholy haste of motor-cars into this county which has lived for centuries to the sound of the galloping feet of horses and the slow tread of fat cattle. And that, again, I account a richness.
"But there is a little left of an ancient British track-way which they call Horn Lane, and there is a maze of other quiet lanes and country roads, edged by hedgerow oaks and wild honeysuckle, where you need move to one side for no one but the harvest wagons with their clouds of attendant finches or the farmer on his way to market." J. Wentworth Day.
The A1 ventures briefly into England's smallest county, Rutland, between Great Casterton and the turning for South Witham and Castle Bytham. The road follows the Roman Ermine Street, rising gently from the Welland at Stamford onto a plateau, gently undulating between about 100 and 120 metres. The underlying geology is Jurassic Oolite, the Lincolnshire Limestone, and there are numerous old limestone pits and small quarries along the roadside. The earliest part of the Limestone is the Collyweston Slate. It is a thin group of siliceous limestones, weathering into thin, regular slabs, which form a beautiful roofing material. Below lie clays and sands of the Lower Estuarine and then the Northampton Ironstone. This is a 20 foot thick layer of richly ferruginous sandstone which has been extensively excavated quarried in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Apart from the tracks of disused railways and old tucked away quarries, there is little obvious evidence of the once industrial landscape that dominated this part of Rutland to the west of the great North Road. Find out more at the Rutland Railway Museum. It tells the story of the ironstone quarrying system. The museum site is at the loading point for ironstone quarried in the Cottesmore area. The ore was brought to the site by lorry and tipped into the railway wagons from the tipping dock. There are lots of old engines and wagons too. There are some pleasant walks along the long-disused Oakham - Melton-Mowbray canal, now providing some little wetland nature reserves. To find the museum turn off the A1 at Stretton and take the A668 westwards about four miles. Just through Cottesmore turn right and immediately left and on another mile to SK886137.
Back to the road and five miles out of Stamford we pass Losecote Field, which deserves a page of its own:
Just north of Losecoat Field is the site of the lost medieval village of Hardwick. Hardwick Farm, a 19th century building, is now a golf club house. They claim the 16th hole goes right across the battlefield. Link to Rutland County Golf Course. North again is a disused wartime airfield, RAF Woolfox Lodge onetime home of 61 Squadron.
The straight section of road between Great Casterton and the bend by Woolfox Airfield was called Horn Lane. The Horn Lane Toll bar was just south of the bend by the sixth milestone from Stamford. In 1783 the Trustees ordered a ‘weighing engine’ to be erected here, so that overweight wagons and carriages could be charged additional tolls, and damage to the new road surface reduced. The post of toll-collector could be highly lucrative; in 1794 the tolls of Horn Lane were ‘Let by Auction, to the best Bidder’ above the sum collected in the previous year of £621.7s.1d. By 1831 the Horn Lane Toll's value had increased to £1,152 per annum.
The straight sections of road here follow precisely the line of the Roman Ermine Street. Maragry, in 1955, observed: "At Tickencote the alignment is resumed and the road becomes highly raised, up to 5 feet, continuing very straight all the way to the point on high ground near Greetham, where a turn more to the north is made. This turn is a particularly good example of the layout of Roman alignments with sharp changes of direction at high sighting-points, and it is remarkable to see the heavy traffic of the Great North Road still taking its course up to and round this sharp angle, across open country that would have allowed a gentle curve, merely because the Roman engineers laid out the road thus and it has never been modified." It was not to remain so. The A1 now does follow a gentle curve and the now far heavier traffic need not slow from its 70mph unless to stop at the cafe in the lay-by formed by the Roman sharp angle. Trollope identified this corner by the landmark of Greetham Mill, a windmill that used to stand just south west of the corner on this high ground. There was also a watermill nearby, on rather less high ground, at Quinton Lodge, a couple of hundred yards further west. There is a little track that leads down the hill from the lay-by to the North Brook, a tributary of the Gwash.
In 1912 Phillips wrote: "The Great North Road enters Rutland near Great Casterton, and, after following the line of the old Roman road (Ermine Street), leaves the county beyond Thistleton Gap, a distance of twelve miles. This was part of the old coaching road from London to York. There is a very large amount of traffic on the road and since the advent of the motor car the cost of maintenance has considerably increased, being at the present time £120 a mile." The 'very large amount of traffic' was not evident in Phillips' accompanying photograph but it shows that the road had not yet been tarmaced.
The Great North Road at Tickencote in 1912
In 1769 John Bowland (who?) was hanged at Empingham corner on the Great North Road. The spot was once called 'Bowland's Gibbet and a gibbet was still there in 1900. It was said that the last man hanged there stole sheep.
©Biff Vernon 2001