Monday 10 August 2015

Fotheringhaye


A tiny village, but once the sight of a royal castle, the originally Norman mound of which is on the right.  The grandeur and position of the village church, once a much longer collegiate church, reminds me of the position of St George's Chapel in relation to the Round Tower (which also sits on an originally Norman castle mound) at Windsor.  Had this site developed in the same way, instead of a farmhouse (visible) and a row of cottages (hidden behind trees), the whole of this picture would be within modern castle walls.


In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Richard III was born here and Mary, Queen of Scots executed here, so it gets more than its fair share of attention from odd balls, some of whom may have been responsible for planting thistles on the castle mound (from which these lower two pictures were taken looking across the Nene).  

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