Cycling up the hill through the pretty village of Gumley, I was struck by the sight of an Italianate campanile type tower at the top of the hill. It vies for attention with the steeple of the nearby church and wins easily. Later research revealed this to be a highly embellished water tower set above the stables to Gumley Hall (demolished in 1964). The tower held water for the horses stabled below.

I took the lane towards Saddington, which passes over a ridge of 540 feet at the trig point by the lane-side, just above Holloway Spinney.

I pulled up at a laneside gateway on the steep descent from the ridge alongside Holloway Spinney, and contemplated how the field full of very pronounced ridge and furrow across the lane, now full of sheep, would once have been full of hardworking peasants cultivating their individual strips of land in vast open fields, before enclosure, hedgerows and sheep revolutionised the landscape laid out before me. The field stood out from the others, which have long since had their ancient ridge and furrow ploughed out.

The top of the field which coincides with the top of the ridge, has a heath-like feel about it. It is rough, wild, scrub, unfarmed. There is I think gorse amongst it all at the highest point. Why unfarmed? There’s probably a rocky outcrop below it all.

Looking out in the direction of Fleckney and Newton Harcourt, I could see hills on the horizon, in the distant haze. Were they beyond Leicester? Yes I think so. Likely Charnwood Forest or the Leicestershire Wolds.

© John Dunn.

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