Death of Eleanor of Castile (1290)

It was a strange day. We thought we'd mark the death of Eleanor of Castile by visiting the sites of some of her  crosses.

Geddington is a lovely village. Thankfully it's not too bad a drive from Husborne Crawley, but with a scary ford. Beautifully-preserved cross in a wonderful place.

Hardingstone (Northampton) - Not so picturesque. A bit noisy with traffic, and the end's fallen off.

Stony Stratford - we forgot to turn off the A5 and went straight past by mistake. Shame really. Stony's also got a tree where Wesley preached, and the Cock & Bull pubs famous for the stories.

Dunstable - We visited the Eleanor Cross, but it's a little chi-chi shopping precinct. The cross itself was smashed up by those arch-hooligans, Cromwell's Men (c).  Although at least the Eleanor Cross is not as ugly as the Quadrant, that homage to rubbish 60s architecture. And no, Dunstable, those blue triangles you stuck on it in the 80s didn't help at all.

Woburn - nobody knows where the Cross was. So frankly the visit would have been a total waste of time if it weren't on the way home. Still, being Woburn we were able to buy some of the traditional local products (antiques, knick-knacks and a couple of houses). I wonder what Woburn was good for before they invented heritage.

But you've got to reflect - this was a real love story.He was a real murderous, tyrannical, blood-letting French-people-killing de Montfort-crushing Scots-hammerer, was Edward I. An equal-opportunities hater, as well as going on the crusades he expelled the Jews. And yet when Eleanor - the mother of as many as sixteen of his children - died, the heart-broken Edward had a cross erected at every place where her funeral procession from Nottinghamshire to London stopped. He's written a love story right across the South Midlands - one that still exists, in names and stones, to this day.