Northamptonshire

Left: Eleanor Cross at Geddington; right: Triangular Lodge; and John Clare Cottage, below

bridges over the winding water. Between Fotheringhay and Geddington are lovely places with lovely names: Aldwincle, Pilton, Lowick, Grafton Underwood, Wadenhoe.

The Jacobean manor Wadenhoe House is said to have been one of the meeting places for the Gunpowder Plotters. So, too, was Triangular Lodge, at Rushton, arguably the strangest building not only in the county but possibly in Britain. It was designed by Thomas Tresham as an assertion of faith in the Holy Trinity when he was a Catholic imprisoned (1581-93) by the Protestant establishment. A trefoil was the family symbol (tres being, of course, Latin for three, and the first syllable of their name – an abundance of threes). The building has three sides, three floors, three windows in each wall, three panes of glass in each window, 33 characters in the inscription on each wall, and so on...

Thomas’s son, Francis, was one of the ill-fated plotters. Back in Geddington church, trefoils and coded messages of contrition decorate a rood screen donated by the Treshams to make up for their part in the plot – and suck up to the powers that be.

A more successful revolution, and the beginning of the end for Charles I, is marked at Naseby. A hilltop monument outside the village is on the spot from which Oliver Cromwell led the counter-attack that finished off the Royalist cause, and gives a chilling view of the moor on which 23,000 men fought.

And just south of here is the Althorp Estate, where a latterday royal hounded to her death lies in peace in her island tomb, surrounded by acres of this green and pleasant county.