St Giles' Church has two fonts, which is one more than most villages this size can justify. Blaston's population was 54 at the last count that bothered to count it separately. By the 2011 census, the parish had been merged with Horninghold because there weren't enough people to warrant its own column in the data.
The village is one street, really. Some of the houses are imposing in a way that suggests money arrived at some point and found nowhere else to go. Rolling south Leicestershire farmland surrounds it on all sides, and the nearest shop is in Medbourne, about a mile down a field track that doubles as a decent dog walk.
There is no pub. There are no shops. If you need either of those things — and you will — Medbourne has The Nevill Arms, and Hallaton is within walking distance if you're the sort of person who considers four or five miles walking distance. Both sit on the Allexton, Blaston, Medbourne and Hallaton circular, a half-day loop of ten to twelve miles that follows the Midshires Way through some of the quietest countryside in the county. The bridleways are well signed. The route passes two pubs, which is good planning.
The church is the thing worth knowing about. George Edmund Street designed it in 1878 — the same George Edmund Street who was, at the time, building the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. What brought one of Victorian England's most prominent architects to a hamlet of thirty-odd people is not entirely clear, though a Reverend Fenwicke is believed to have paid for it. Inside, there's a painting of St Jerome on the north wall by the Brazilian artist Decio Vilares, and two segments of stained glass in the nave with a provenance that winds from the old House of Lords through the family of an Archbishop of York to a Lady Archer, who eventually gave them to this church. For a building you could walk past in ten seconds, it contains a surprising amount of history.
Five hundred yards away stand the remains of St Michael's Chapel — lower walls and a west doorway with a cinquefoiled head, which is all that survived its demolition in 1967. Before that, Blaston had two churches for two parishes, both serving the same hamlet. St Michael's was in use before 1389. Its parishioners had to be buried at Hallaton, a few miles north, which must have made funerals an expedition.
The Domesday surveyors recorded about 29 households here in 1086, which puts it in the largest 40 per cent of settlements at the time. It has gone the other way since.
Walkers will find the Roman Gartree Road running to the south, connecting Colchester to Chester via Leicester. Pottery from the first to fifth centuries — wine and oil amphorae among it — has turned up in the fields along its route. The Midshires Way, all 225 miles of it from London to the Peak District, passes through the same corridor.
On the last Sunday in June, the Blaston and District Agricultural Show fills the village with considerably more people than normally live in it. For the rest of the year, the street is quiet enough that you can hear the bell in St Giles' bell-cote from one end to the other. There is only the one bell.
