Qualla: Rutland

Rutland: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MortimerCat, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a lorry parked outside the offices of Leicestershire County Council in the early 1960s sat a fake battleship called HMS Rutland. Fireworks were being shot at the building from its decks. The county that built that papier-mache warship was 152 square miles in area, had fewer than 30,000 people, and was about to be merged out of existence by Whitehall planners who thought England's smallest county was an administrative absurdity. Rutland decided, with a kind of beery, theatrical seriousness, that it was not going to disappear. It would take another twenty-odd years and a temporary 1974 abolition before the county was fully restored, but the battleship gives you the flavour of the place.

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Image: MortimerCat | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rutland: Roteland

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Cutts from Bristol, England, UK, CC BY 2.0. Rutland appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Roteland, which means simply the land belonging to Rota, an Old English personal name meaning the pleasant or cheerful one. That etymology has aged well. The county is small, rural, mostly limestone and ironstone, with hedgerow-edge...

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Image: Robert Cutts from Bristol, England, UK | CC BY 2.0

Rutland: Fighting Abolition

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cmglee, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 1958 to 1967 Local Government Commission for England looked at Rutland and concluded that a county with the population of a small market town was indefensible. The first draft proposals would have split Rutland in two, sending Ketton east into a new Cambridgeshire and the wes...

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Image: Cmglee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rutland: Sundew Walks to Corby

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom walker, CC BY 3.0. Until the 1970s, Rutland was iron country. The ironstone under the fields fed the steelworks at Corby, and walking draglines the size of small buildings stripped the topsoil off entire pastures. When the Exton quarries closed in 1973, a 1,675-ton dragline named Sundew was no long...

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Image: Tom walker | CC BY 3.0

Rutland: The Happiest County

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Saxton, CC0. In 2012 the Office for National Statistics published a well-being report that found Rutland to be the happiest county in mainland Britain. Rutland also has the highest fertility rate of any English county at 2.81 children per woman, ranks 348th out of 354 on the Indices of Depriv...

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Image: Christopher Saxton | CC0

Rutland: Old Stones, New Maps

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris McAuley, CC BY-SA 2.0. Building stone tells you what a place is made of. In Rutland the walls and field boundaries are limestone and ironstone, and the older roofs are Collyweston stone slate, a fissile pale grey slate split out of nearby quarries. The Ketton Cement Works quarry exposes the best sectio...

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Image: Chris McAuley | CC BY-SA 2.0