Bagworth Heath and Newbold Verdon
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This walk starts at Bagworth Heath Country Park. Once a massive coal mine, The Woodland Trust has turned it into a lovely park. The hills you see are not real hills, but slag heaps, thousands of tons of waste brought up from deep underground and now landscaped with trees, grass and wildflowers. Walk 3603 will take you up the highest of these. Whenever British Coal (formerly National Coal Board) announced that a pit had reached the million tonne mark per annum, it allowed the collieries concerned to fly the Union Jack for twelve months. Desford became an elite pit, because few could reach this target in the 1950s. Those magic million-tonne years stretched from 1953 to 1959. During these years the Union Jack flew summer and winter above the canteen. Nestling in the valley inside the eastern fringe of Bagworth Parish, Desford Pit was the youngster of the deep mines. The shafts were sunk in 1901 and closed in February 1984. During its 83 years of existence, seven profitable seams of coal were mined. From there you pass through Royal Tigers Wood, where there is a memorial to The Royal Leicestershire Regiment. Walk 3714 allows you to explore these woods further and to see the many plaques in the arboretum depicting their battles around the world.
Records for Newbold Verdon go back as far as 1086. In 1801 Newbold Verdon had eighty houses in which lived ninety families, 339 people. Of those employed, 89 worked in agriculture and 116 in trade and manufacture. Newbold Verdon grew quickly during the nineteenth century and by 1846 there was a population of 605 inhabitants, rising to 716 in 1871. By this time too there had been other changes and Sir Edward Hartopp was Lord of the Manor. As well as the parish church of St James, a Baptist Chapel was built in 1833 and later, a Primitive Methodist Chapel. Money left by Lord Crewe, then the Bishop of Durham, when he died in 1720 bought a building for a Free School at a cost of £30. The Manor House, once the home of Lord Crewe, became the home of the Montagu family. There was a corn mill on Desford Road in Newbold Verdon and it was operational in 1846. However, by 1884 it had been demolished and was not included on the Ordnance Survey map that was published in that year. There is no evidence of the mill today.
England - Central England - Leicestershire - Countryside
Features
Birds, Butterflies, Flowers, Food Shop, Great Views, Lake/Loch, Mostly Flat, Pub, Public Transport, Wildlife, Woodland
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