Thorpe Malsor is a village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

west of

Kettering Kettering is a market and industrial town in North Northamptonshire, England. It is located north of London and north-east of Northampton, west of the River Ise, a tributary of the River Nene. The name means "the place (or territory) of ...

, Northamptonshire, England. The population at the 2011 Census was 145.

History

The village's name means 'outlying farm/settlement'. The village was held by Fucher Malesoures ( Malesouveres) in the twelfth century. In the

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...

it was called 'Alida's outlying farm/settlement', potentially a shortening of the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

female individual name, 'Aethelgyth'. The Church of England parish church of All Saints was built late in the 13th and early in the 14th centuries. In 1877 the Gothic Revival architect C.C. Rolfe restored the church, with

Harry Hems Harry Hems (12 June 1842 – 5 January 1916) was an English architectural and ecclesiastical sculptor who was particularly inspired by Gothic architecture and a practitioner of Gothic Revival. He founded and ran a large workshop in Exeter, Devon ...

of Exeter undertaking the carving. All Saints parish is now part of a single benefice with the parishes of Broughton, Cransley and Loddington. The village well in the middle of the main street was sunk in 1589. Thorpe Malsor Hall is a Jacobean house that was refenestrated in the 18th century and enlarged in 1817.

Ironstone quarrying

Thorpe Malsor sits in the Northamptonshire ironstone field. Between 1903 and 1949, iron ore was quarried from extensive, shallow pits on the north and west sides of the village. These pits were connected to the ironworks north of

, by branch of the

narrow gauge A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge narrower than standard . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and . Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with tighter curves, smaller structu ...

Kettering Ironstone Railway. The first pit was close to the village on the west side. The last was further west. The railway crossed the valley north-east of the village on a substantial viaduct. The branch was removed in 1949. The railway was worked by steam locomotives including an unusual double ended locomotive built by the Sentinel Company which had a central cab and a boiler and chimney at each end. This was mostly used on the Thorpe Malsor branch. Steam quarrying machines were introduced from 1918 and diesel ones from 1944.

References

External links

* Villages in Northamptonshire Civil parishes in Northamptonshire North Northamptonshire {{Northamptonshire-geo-stub

History

Ironstone quarrying

References

Further reading

External links