Welcome to our development site where we are undertaking a major rebuild of the village history website cottinghamhistory.co.uk.
This rebuild is going to take some time and we’re approaching it in sections – so please bear with us! As well as moving the old content across, there are lots of new pictures and information to include and we also plan to expand the site to include more about Middleton.
Meanwhile, if you have any photos or stories about the history of either village, please email them to jane@cottinghamhistory.co.uk. And do let us know if you spot any errors. Note that, during this development phase, some of the hyperlinks on here may point back to the old site.
Regards,
Jane Smith, Editor
Villages like Cottingham clamber up and down a hillside so steep that often your view across the deep ever-changing valley into the blue distance is over someone’s chimney pots. These are the windswept villages through which a North-Easter will whistle and boom, led straight in from the Fens by the narrowing funnel of the vale of the Welland.
They are bleak in Winter, but in Summer there are few places more inviting to the traveller with lazy hours to spend. Cottingham has a secluded tree-fringed dell where you may sit with old men and watch boys play cricket. There you might believe that the industrial revolution had never come to England and that the more daring of the boys might grow up to captain a clipper, but would certainly never travel by devilish means and at unnatural speeds through the sky.
Extract from Northamptonshire, Tony Ireson, 1954
…Few villages in Northamptonshire are built on such a declivity, for it is scattered down the steep scarp above the Welland and looks a long way into Leicestershire. With its fine church, its houses mainly of stone and attractively dispersed, and its excellent situation, Cottingham has much to recommend it.
Extract from Discovering Northamptonshire, Jack Gould, 1969