Qualla: Shepshed

Shepshed: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Duncan Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0. Until 1888 the spelling was Sheepshed, and before that Sheepshead, and before that, in the Domesday Book of 1086, Scepeshefde Regis - the King's hill where the sheep graze. There are not many English towns whose entire identity is fixed by their name as squarely as that. Shepshed sat on a Leicestershire hilltop, kept sheep, sold their wool, and built itself slowly around the trade. A medieval Cistercian abbey two miles south did the same on a grander scale. The wool stopped being king centuries ago. The name kept its grammar.

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Image: Duncan Harris | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shepshed: Domesday and the Royal Lodge

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Pyle, CC BY-SA 2.0. The suffix Regis in the Domesday entry implies that there was once a royal hunting lodge on the high ground above the village, although no one has ever turned up its footings. Whatever it was, it lent the town the King's stamp on its name. Local antiquarians point to two roads th...

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Image: Colin Pyle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shepshed: The Cistercians of Garendon

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Poyser, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two miles south of the town sat Garendon Abbey, founded in 1133 by Robert de Beaumont, 2nd Earl of Leicester, and run by Cistercian monks who - like Cistercians everywhere in medieval Europe - turned out to be very good at sheep farming. Garendon Abbey accumulated granges across ...

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Image: John Poyser | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shepshed: Earthquakes, Fires, and a Failed Canal

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 30 September 1750, while the Reverend Thomas Heath of St Botolph's was administering Communion, an earthquake shook the church. He recorded the event in the parish register with the words this day, while I was administering the Sacrament, between the hours of 12 and 1 o'clock,...

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Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shepshed: Mid-Twentieth Century

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Pyle, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 18th-century enclosures parcelled out roughly 2,000 acres of common land among the village's principal commoners and ended a way of life that had run for centuries. The town that emerged kept its small wool-and-market character into the twentieth century, then expanded around...

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Image: Colin Pyle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shepshed: Charnwood from the Air

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Hassocks5489, CC0. Shepshed sits on the edge of Charnwood Forest, the ancient upland of Precambrian volcanic rock that pushes through the Leicestershire plain. From cruise altitude the town reads as a compact triangle of streets between the M1 to the west and the green sweep of Garendon Park to the...

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Image: User:Hassocks5489 | CC0