Qualla: Oundle

Oundle: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Kev747 at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. St Peter's spire is two hundred and ten feet high. There is nothing else for miles that comes close, and from any approach the town presents itself first as that thin Northamptonshire needle rising out of farmland, then as the cluster of honey-grey houses tucked into a horseshoe bend of the Nene. Oundle is built on Jurassic oolite, the same fine pale limestone that gives Stamford and the Cotswolds their light, and the town has been quarrying itself out of the riverbank since at least the Iron Age. Six thousand two hundred and fifty-four people lived here at the 2021 census, plus around a thousand boarders who come and go each term.

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Image: The original uploader was Kev747 at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Oundle: St Wilfrid's Last Breath

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, CC BY-SA 4.0. St Wilfrid, the seventh-century Northumbrian bishop who had argued for the Roman computation of Easter at the Synod of Whitby and then fallen in and out of favour with successive kings, died at Oundle in 709 AD in a monastery he had consecrated. Eddi, his chantor and biographer, ...

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Image: Immanuel Giel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Oundle: The Talbot's Staircase

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Naray14, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Talbot Hotel on New Street is built of stone carted four miles up the road in 1626 from the ruins of Fotheringhay Castle. The hotel had originally been timber-framed; its rebuilding in stone happened just as the castle was finally being broken up for materials. Local traditio...

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Image: Naray14 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Oundle: Ironstone Streets and a Festival Organ

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Trolove, CC BY-SA 2.0. Oundle's terraces are built almost entirely of local stone: warm ironstone with paler oolite for the better houses, slate roofs from Collyweston a few miles north. The Old Town Hall on the market square, the long terrace of Georgian fronts on West Street, the narrow medieval alle...

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Image: Michael Trolove | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oundle: The Memorial and the Bypass

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Rob, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Oundle and Ashton War Memorial stands at the junction of New Street and West Street, unveiled on 14 November 1920 by Frederick William Sanderson, the great headmaster of Oundle School. The memorial carries ninety-five names: sixty-eight from the First World War, twenty-seven ...

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Image: Ian Rob | CC BY-SA 2.0