Finedon

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Finedon
St Mary the Virgin Church, Finedon
Finedon Location within Northamptonshire
Area	14.82 km2 (5.72 sq mi)
Population	4,552 (2021 Census)
• Density	307/km2 (800/sq mi)
OS grid reference	SP9171
Civil parish	Finedon
Unitary authority	North Northamptonshire
Ceremonial county	Northamptonshire
Region	East Midlands
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	WELLINGBOROUGH
Postcode district	NN9
Dialling code	01933
Police	Northamptonshire
Fire	Northamptonshire
Ambulance	East Midlands
UK Parliament	Wellingborough
List of places UK England Northamptonshire 52°20′24″N 0°38′56″W / 52.340°N 0.649°W / 52.340; -0.649

Finedon is a town^[1] and civil parish in North Northamptonshire, England, with a population at the

.

From the 1860s the parish was much excavated for its iron ore, which lay underneath a layer of limestone and was quarried over the course of 100 years or more. Local furnaces produced

.

History

Domesday Book

In 1086 when the

At the time of the Domesday Book Finedon was one of only four towns listed with a population greater than 50 in Northamptonshire - the others being Northampton, Brackley and Rushton.^{[citation needed]}

The Bell Inn also claims to be listed in the Domesday Book, but the current building does not date back to this period, and there is evidence that the original inn was situated several hundred metres away. However, the main building was built around 1598, with the current façade added in 1872.^{[citation needed]}

St Mary's Church

The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, is a mid-14th-century church with an

.

The tower houses a

.

Finedon Hall

Finedon Hall is a Grade II listed 17th- or 18th-century country house with later modifications. It is built in the Tudor style to an H-shaped floor plan in two storeys with attics. It is constructed in ironstone ashlar with limestone dressings and a slate roof.^[9]

The house has now been converted into apartments.

Finedon Obelisk

The Finedon Obelisk is a monument erected in 1789 to record the blessings of the year by Sir John English Dolben, the fourth and last of the

. The 23 April 1789 was appointed a day of thanksgiving to commemorate the event, which in Finedon was celebrated with bell ringing, fireworks and the firing of cannon.

The obelisk is located in a small enclosure next to the

roundabout.

Volta Tower

Finedon was formerly home to the Volta Tower, a

William Digby Dolben, who drowned off the west coast of Africa on 1 September 1863, aged 24. The building stood for 86 years before collapsing in 1951, killing one of its residents.

Water Tower

The Water Tower was completed in 1904, originally costing £1500 to build, with the whole scheme of public water provision for Finedon costing £13,000. The tower is octagonal in shape and is divided into five interior stages. The exterior of the building is a red, yellow and blue polychrome brick design with a lead and plain-tile roof.

The Water Tower has since been converted into a private residence and in 1973, gained Grade II listed status.^[10] It stands as a local landmark beside the A6 on the southern entrance into Finedon.

Governance

At the introduction of modern Local Government by the

The town is now under the jurisdiction of

Parliamentary constituency

.

Geography

The town of Finedon rises to approximately 90 metres Above Ordinance Datum from the River Ise, with the historical centre of the settlement occupying a shallow south-west facing valley. The contemporary point of maximum elevation in the parish is the summit of the disused Sidegate Lane Landfill Site, located south of the town at approximately 108 metres Above Ordinance Datum. The parish covers a total area of 1,482 hectares (3,662 acres).

Town Brook

Finedon's origins are likely related to the availability of water from the "Town Brook" which historically flowed through the central axis of the settlement. It is now entirely culverted from its spring fed source north-east of Finedon all the way through the town, eventually surfacing in the grounds of Finedon Hall. From here, it flows through The Grove and arable farmland to meet the River Ise near the Cally Banks.

The Town Brook was dammed in the 1780s by instruction from Sir William Dolben to create a lake in the parkland associated with Finedon Hall. The lake had an island, which was accessed via a small rowing boat for picnics.^[12] The lake was drained in 1880 after a typhoid outbreak in the town and the remains of the earth dam and spillway can still be found in The Grove.

Until the mid-19th century, Dolben Square alongside Affleck Bridge also contained a substantial pond fed by the Town Brook called "The Ware", the name derived from "wayour", a pond for washing horses.^[13]

Banks Park

Finedon's main park, complete with outdoor tennis courts and an open place popular among dog walkers and cyclists. There is also a play area for children consisting of swings, climbing frame, roundabout, assault course and more. Banks Park sits between Burton Road, High Street and Wellingborough Road, Finedon and can be accessed from both High Street and Wellingborough Road.

Pocket Park

From 1939 until 1946 ironstone was extracted from the quarry at Finedon and transported via a railway line to the main line at Wellingborough.

Rather than filling in the railway cutting and quarry and returning it to agricultural land, the people of Finedon campaigned to retain it as an important wildlife area. In 1984, it was designated the first Pocket Park in the country.^[14] The heritage of the park as a quarry led to it earning its local name "The Pits".

The quarry area is predominantly

to maximise its benefit for the flora and fauna. Scrub in the quarry is cut back to maintain the grassland, whilst large trees and other patches of scrub are left to provide feeding and nesting sites for birds. The ponds are also managed to ensure they do not become completely overhung by trees.

Old coppiced lime trees estimated to be over three hundred years as well as yews of considerable age are to be found alongside the labyrinth of trails that cross the site.

Access to the park can be found via Station Road and Avenue Road, next to the Finedon Dolben Cricket Club.

To the south western side of Finedon Pocket Park is another nature reserve, Finedon Cally Banks,

which provides the poor soil conditions in which wildflowers flourish.

Climate

Finedon, much like the rest of the British Isles, experiences an oceanic climate and as such does not endure extreme temperatures and benefits from fairly evenly spread rainfall throughout the year.

Education

Finedon is served by two primary schools, the Finedon Infant School for children aged 4 to 7, and the Finedon Mulso Church of England Junior school for ages 7 to 11. The two schools became federated in 2011 and are now operated as one school with one headteacher. Supervisory childcare is available both before and after conventional school hours by the Apple Tree Club, located next to the Infant School.^[17]

There is no secondary school in Finedon, so pupils are required to travel outside of the town to continue their education after leaving the Junior school.

.

Pre-school and early years' education for ages 2 and up is catered for by St Michael's playgroup, rated "Good" by Ofsted in July 2014.^[18]

Finedon Ironstone

The dark brown ironstone that underlies the parish is one of Northamptonshire's more durable building stones, unlike much of the ironstone elsewhere in the county which can become crumbly or delaminate.^[19] The 14th-century church is built mainly from this stone, which is presumed to have been quarried locally (with paler coloured limestone of Weldon Stone around the windows and door.) Other older buildings in the town also use the local ironstone, notably the vicarage and a house opposite the church built in 1712 as a charity school for girls.^[19] The various works of the Dolben family also make use of the ironstone. Chemical changes within the stone, while it was still in the ground, have resulted in a hard crystalline mineral version of Limonite which bonds the particles together, creating a harder, more durable ironstone, but which was still workable when lifted from the ground. An Enclosure map of 1805 records two stone pits in the town.^[19]

Quarries

In the early part of Britain's Industrial Revolution, the Northamptonshire ironstone was ignored as a source of iron ore because unlike areas such as South Wales and the north of England, it had no coal to power the furnaces. In the mid 19th century the railways arrived, which meant that either the ore could be taken to distant furnaces, or coal brought to furnaces near the iron deposits.^[20] Both happened at Finedon from the 1860s.

Glendon Iron Ore Company

Quarries in the Finedon and Burton Latimer area, began with the workings of the Glendon Iron Ore Company, who in 1866 built the Finedon Furnaces, near Finedon station, along the eastern side the Midland Railway that had opened in 1857. Furnace Lane still runs through the industrial estate where the furnace once stood. The open-top furnace produced pig iron from 1866 to 1891,^[21] and numerous quarry pits to the north, east and south of the town were engaged in the laborious task of clearing back overlying rocks (sometimes up to 25 feet thick) using wheelbarrows and planks. The underlying ironstone was then loaded into wagons which used a series of tramways to get the ore to the furnace, or later processed at a Calciting plant and then transported by rail to furnaces in the coal fields of Derbyshire or beyond.^[22]

Stanton Ironworks

Areas south and east of the town were quarried by the

Neilson's Quarries

Walter Neilson was quarrying in areas close to the town, either side of Ryegate Hill from before 1879.[25] In 1881 he laid Neilson's Tramway a 2 ft 4 in (711 mm) gauge tramway down to sidings on the Midland Railway. These siding were called "Neilson's Sidings" until at least the 1990s.^[26] Neilson's original pits were exhausted by 1892 and he leased new land on the east side of Finedon Road, immediately south of the town. This new pit was known as Thingdon Quarry. In 1911 Neilson's operation was taken over by Wellingborough Iron Company (see below).^[27]

Wellingborough Iron Company

To the south and east of the town, several companies operated quarries. Amongst these were the Rixon Iron and Brick company, which began quarrying near Finedon in 1874. Rixon laid the 1,000 mm (3 ft 3+3⁄8 in) gauge

Stanton Ironworks Company was acquired by

Ironstone production

Quarried ironstone from the area had initially produced pig iron for use in cast-iron production. After 1879, with the development of the Gilchrist–Thomas process the production of steel was made possible using iron ore with a high Phosphate content, such as the Northamptonshire Ironstone.^[20] Around Finedon the quarries south of the town near Ryebury Hill and Sidegate Lane had been worked extensively between the 1870s and 1900s, using a labour-intensive method in which a long trench (or gullet) through the overburden was established, along which a tramway could transport the ore. The overburden (often of considerable depth) was loaded into wheelbarrows and taken via planks suspended over the trench, to be dumped on the far side, so that the next section of ore could be dug out.^[22] In this way the trench would gradually migrate across a field, and the reinstated land would be several feet lower than the surrounding fields. In the 20th century the introduction of ever larger dragline excavators allowed faster working with far fewer people employed.^[20] The smaller steel plants had all been merged in 1967 and most were shut down in favour of the Corby Works. This too ceased steel production in 1980, and all Finedon quarrying had ceased by that point.^[20]

Geological SSSI

Towards the southern end of the parish, one of the quarries that had been worked since at least the 1920s is

Notable people

• Arthur Henfrey, football player for England between 1891 and 1896
• Sir Gilbert Dolben, 1st Baronet, Tory politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1685 to 1715
• Sir William Dolben, 3rd Baronet, MP and campaigner for the abolition of slavery
• Digby Mackworth Dolben, teenage poet brought up at Finedon Hall, who died young
• Richard Coles, Vicar of Finedon parish from 2011 to 2022^[32] and former pop musician with The Communards
• Charles Addis, English first-class cricketer
• Robert Clarke, English cricketer active from 1947 to 1957
• Terry Freeman, English cricketer, cousin of Robert Clarke
• David Imms, artist and painter
• John Minney, English cricketer active from 1959 to 1967
• Herbert Paul, English writer and Liberal MP

Town Twinning

Along with

• Niort, France since 1977
• Wittlich, Germany since 1993

See also

• Dutch Doll of Finedon
• Finedon railway station

References

Notes

Sources

• John Bailey (1987). Finedon Revealed. Finedon: J.L.H. Bailey.
  OCLC 16078775
  .
• John Bailey (2004). Look at Finedon. Finedon: J.L.H. Bailey.
  OCLC 62584735
  .
• Finedon Historical Society, Finedon Yards
• Audrey Ellis, Memories of Finedon http://www.audrey-ellis.co.uk Archived 4 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• Rosemary Pearson, The Top School

External links

Media related to Finedon at Wikimedia Commons

• Church of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon Online Parish Magazine
• Finedon Web Site Finedon
• http://www.finedonlocalhistorysociety.co.uk/ Finedon local history Society Finedon History
• Finedon Bellringers Archived 13 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine Information about the Bellringers
• A Pictorial view of Finedon Archived 8 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine A selection of Photographs of Finedon