Qualla: Oakham

Oakham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Kelly, CC BY 4.0. There is a custom in Oakham that has, for more than five hundred years, treated the highest in the land as toll-payers. If you are royalty, or a peer of the realm, and your business takes you through this small market town in the middle of England, you owe a horseshoe. Refuse, and tradition holds that one will be forcibly extracted from your horse. Pay up, and your shoe is hung on the wall of the Great Hall of Oakham Castle, where there are now more than two hundred of them, the oldest dating from a visit by King Edward IV around 1470. Princess Anne paid in 1999. Prince Charles paid in 2003. Princess Alexandra paid in 2005. The horseshoes are outsize and ceremonial now, made for the occasion and beautifully decorated, but the principle is the same one a 12th-century lord of the manor would have recognised. In Oakham, the powerful pay a tribute to the town.

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Image: Richard Kelly | CC BY 4.0

Oakham: The Smallest County in England

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Garbutt. SiGarb 18:30, 4 December 2006 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0. Rutland is the kind of place that exists almost as a joke about itself: the smallest historic county in England, abolished in 1974 in a fit of administrative tidiness, restored in 1997 because the people who lived there refused to stop calling themselves Rutlanders. Oakham, with ...

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Image: Simon Garbutt. SiGarb 18:30, 4 December 2006 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Oakham: A Hall Without a Castle

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0. What survives of Oakham Castle is not a castle in the conventional sense. There are no towers, no battlements, no romantic ruins. There is just the great hall, sitting on raised ground within steep earthworks that once held an inner bailey. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pe...

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oakham: The Spire and the Schoolboys

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. The spire of All Saints' Church rises above Oakham for miles in every direction, a 14th-century landmark restored in the 1850s by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the same architect who designed St Pancras station and the Albert Memorial. North-east of the church, the original 1584 buil...

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Image: Andrew Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oakham: Sir Jeffrey Hudson, A Life at Court

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wendy Sanders, CC BY-SA 2.0. Of all the people Oakham has sent into the world, the strangest story belongs to Sir Jeffrey Hudson, born in the town in 1619. Hudson was a person of very short stature - in the language of his own century, he was called a dwarf, and at the age of seven he stood about eighteen in...

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Image: Wendy Sanders | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oakham: A Statue for a New Reign

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summejax, CC0. On 21 April 2024, on what would have been her 98th birthday, a bronze statue of Queen Elizabeth II was unveiled in Oakham. The seven-foot sculpture, on a limestone base, was made by Hywel Pratley and paid for entirely by local donations - businesses and members of the public cont...

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Image: Summejax | CC0