Climbing steeply up out of the seething hollow where Leicester’s busy population strives, the road in a mile and a half comes to the hundredth mile from London. It is quiet and solitary, the village of Wanlip, near by, not revealing its existence. But the neighbourhood of Rothley—i.e. Roth-ley, the red field—on the left hand is presently seen by the disgusting deshabille of the allotments. However economically and socially desirable they may be, allotment gardens have ever a squalid note. Rothley is growing vast and growing ugly, with cheap, flimsy buildings and a hard-working population of stockingers and quarrymen; and the march of the little hutches of provincial suburbia is advancing on Rothley Temple, that historic house in its beautiful park of stately trees where Thomas Babington Macaulay was born, October 25th, 1800, “in a room panelled from floor to ceiling, like every corner of the ancient mansion, with oak almost black with age.” It had been in the time of Queen Elizabeth the home of that Anthony Babington who in 1586 was executed for a wild and foolish plot to murder the Queen and to release the Queen of Scots: a conspiracy that not only failed, but sealed the fate also of the Scottish queen.

The name “Temple” indicates that this was formerly the site of a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and adjoining the house is still a chapel including some remains of the Templars’ church and an effigy of some unknown Crusader.

When raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, the historian sentimentally added “of Rothley,” although, to be sure, he owned no property here. In 1859 he was dead. The place is thus doubly associated with the man who made history a romance, beside whose enthralling pages the novels of the day when his History of England was new were flat and stale. Latter-day destructive critics have fallen foul of his style and reduced what they term “Macaulayese” to a formula in which the use of antithesis takes a prominent and mechanical part. Macaulay’s style, however, remains the most brilliant exemplar of the oratorico-narrative method, and is not likely to suffer greatly at the hands of the unsympathetic.

Still, there is an extravagant note in the epitaph over his grave in Westminster Abbey: “His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth for evermore.” Such language would be almost extravagant if employed upon Shakespeare himself, and is fitting only for a Nelson or a Wellington.

The river Soar, lending its name to a number of neighbouring villages, is responsible for that of Mountsorrel, a lovely name; but the district is full of the most impressive place-names. What a fine mouthful is “Ratcliffe-on-the-Wreake.” It must be a satisfaction to date one’s correspondence from a place like that. “Thrumpton,” too: is that not fine? Walton-on-the-Wolds has its merits, while there is an air of distinction about Groby, recognised centuries ago, when Lord Grey was “Lord Grey of Groby.” But “Barrow-on-Soar” is not nice.

The great rock of Mountsorrel, a bold craggy height of syenite, or exceptionally hard granite, largely quarried for millstones and road-metal, gives its name to the village nestling beneath the crag. A castle once frowned upon the crest of it, but has long been a thing of the past. Even in Camden’s day it was but a heap of rubbish. In remote times a stronghold of the Earls of Leicester, and afterwards of Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, its history is obscure, but it seems early to have been abandoned by those dignified nobles and occupied by bands of outlaws who levied toll upon wayfarers, and behaved so outrageously that at last the countryside was roused. “In the year 1217,” according to Camden, “the inhabitants of these parts pulled it down to the ground, as a nest of the devil, and a den of thieves and robbers.”

An ancient legend told how the devil, on his way to Leicester, essayed the journey in three leaps. At Mountsorrel he mounted his sorrel horse, and made one leap to Wanlip: not an altogether insignificant performance, for the distance is three miles. Thence he sprang a mile further, to Birstall, where horse and rider were both burst with the force of their descent; but with his remaining strength he sprang another mile, to Belgrave, where, a mile short of Leicester, he was buried: and that is how Belgrave got its name. So now we know.

Let no one, charmed with the name of Mountsorrel, come to the place with high expectations of finding a picturesqueness to match. The romantic scenery of rugged rock looking down upon the pleasant valley of the Soar has been since 1845 the scene of quarry operations, and atrocious raw scars seam the mount on all sides; and beneath it, and for close upon a mile along the road, runs an abject townlet of the out-at-elbows, down-at-heel variety, with rows upon rows of mean cottages where many of the seven hundred quarrymen and their families dwell. That is modern Mountsorrel. Enfolded in midst of all these later developments, you still see vestiges of the Mountsorrel of from a hundred to three hundred years ago, when it was a village dependent for its existence solely upon the road. Still stands the “Black Swan”; although, to be sure, it now does little else but stand, being empty and forlorn. Even yet, relics of a happier day, the emblematic bunches of grapes hang from its eighteenth-century red-brick frontage, telling of the generous wine once dispensed within. The “White Swan,” itself a house contemporary with its black brother, is more fortunate, and appears still to thrive.

Mountsorrel is precisely as described above, but it is a charming subject for a sketch. Standing on the cobblestoned footwalk by the “White Swan,” you look across to the granite crag, to a group of old houses, and to the singular, temple-like market-cross that replaces the beautifully shafted Gothic cross removed in 1793. Sir John Danvers of Swithland, a neighbouring squire, afterwards Lord Lanesborough, coveted the cross for his park and offered to erect the existing building in exchange for it; and, the people of Mountsorrel agreeing, the thing was done.

Quorndon succeeds to Mountsorrel, at the interval of a mile and a half. Nowadays, and for many a year past, it has been docked of half its name, and is now “Quorn”; the seal having been set upon the practice by the style adopted for the Great Central Railway’s station, “Quorn and Woodhouse.” And thus are place-names debased. If the name of Quorndon were translated from the ancient Saxon whence it is derived, this would then be called Mill Hill, the “Quorn” coming from “quern,” in the Middle Ages a hand-mill, but originally a mill of any kind. The original Quorndon must therefore have been a mill on the adjoining uplands.

Woodhouse itself lies away back in Charnwood Forest, with the parish of Woodhouse Eaves adjoining; the “Eaves” in the name referring to its ancient situation on the edge, or “eaves,” of the Forest; although there have been those who derived it from the remarkable cavern, over whose roof the modern church is built.

The village of Quorndon, once and for long years the home of the famous Quorn Hunt, has since 1905 lost that distinction. The old kennels were then relinquished, and new built two miles away, at Barrow-on-Soar, a busy place of lime-works, with a church remarkable for a number of eccentric epitaphs on the Cave family, of which here below is an example:

One is curious to know what kind of men they were who wrote this sort of thing. Nothing seems to have been sacred to these funeral funny fellows and mortuary wags, who would start a conceit on false premisses, pursue it to its own death, and then worry it into rags.

It was about 1750 that Hugo Meynell, the “Father of Fox-hunting,” purchased Quorn Hall and established the hounds, and he hunted and he halloed for forty-eight years over a huge stretch of country from Market Harborough to the Trent—more than thirty miles across—so that there was scarce a bullfinch whose rails his horses’ hoofs had not scraped in all this hunting territory. He knew the muddy bottom of many a ditch and had been soused in every stream before his hunting days were done and his son succeeded him as Master for a brief two years. Meynell not only established the Hunt, but made it pre-eminent, and Quorn was then—what with the lavish hospitality he dispensed at the Hall, and with the many hunting men who took up their quarters here—what Melton Mowbray is now, the metropolis of hunting. The village—or little town that it was for gaiety—was in fact too lively and too expensive for some, and it was this too great success that led to Melton arising in its stead: an old-time sportsman discovering the then unknown sleepy old market-town and establishing himself there, for quiet and economy. Hunting men who have ridden to hounds in Leicestershire any time during the last sixty years or more will smile at the association of Melton with cheapness. Our exploratory sportsman of long ago had, however, made a great discovery. He found that Quorndon being in the centre of the Quorn Hunt, you must hunt, unless you be exceptionally energetic, almost exclusively with that pack; whereas from Melton, that town standing in the marches of other hunts, you might be loyal to your old love and yet take the field, day in and day out, with the Belvoir and the Cottesmore as well. And thus the fame and fortune of Melton grew.

This is no place to tell of the glories of the Quorn Hunt under Assheton-Smith, or Osbaldiston—“The Squire,” as every one loved to call him; or the further splendours under Sir Richard Sutton, who, when asked why he hunted seven days a week, replied, “Because I can’t hunt eight.” The annals of the Hunt are extensive and the gossip endless, ranging through the whole gamut of sentiment: rising to Homeric laughter and sinking to the depths of mysticism, as when the older villagers tell you of the story, elderly when even they were young, of how Dick Burton, the huntsman, died and was buried in Quorndon churchyard, and how the hounds killed a fox on his grave at the close of the next hunting day.

The interior of Quorndon church is beautiful and exquisitely kept, particularly the Farnham Chapel, the property of the ancient Farnham family, seated at Quorndon for many centuries past, and still here. The chapel, only to be entered by favour, is filled with the elaborate monuments of bygone Farnhams, of which the most notable is that to John Farnham, Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, who died in 1587. He lies in life-sized effigy beside Dorothy his wife, and is habited in armour, with a representation by his side of the axe carried by the honourable corps of which he was a member, whose duties were to form a bodyguard to the Sovereign on public occasions. “Pensioner” appears to be a misleading term, the membership being honorary and entailing expense, rather than bringing payment.

John Farnham appears to have been also a kind of captain of free-lances, warring in the pay of foreign princes on the Continent. An alabaster bas-relief on the wall of the chapel (like the tomb itself, recently restored) shows him leading his men on to the siege of a castle. A quaint epitaph in verse tells us something of what he was: