The Old Post Office on the lane through Edmondthorpe still has its date stone — 1885 — though it hasn't sold a stamp in decades. Don and Jean Theobold ran the shop and post office until at least 1984. After that, the village quietly stopped having anywhere to buy anything.
There is no pub either. The nearest is in Wymondham, about a mile north, which is close enough if you don't mind the walk and far enough if it's raining.
What Edmondthorpe does have is a church, a ruined hall, a witch legend, and a lot of trees. For a village of this size, that's a reasonable haul.
St Michael and All Angels stands near the centre, surrounded by farms and cottages and the remains of Edmondthorpe Hall. The Churches Conservation Trust took it on in 1999, which is the polite way of saying the parish could no longer maintain it. The building is primarily 13th century, rebuilt in the 14th and 15th, with a battlemented tower whose lower stage dates from the 1200s and whose upper part was added two centuries later.
Inside, the thing you came to see is the three-tiered alabaster monument to Sir Roger Smith, who died in 1655. He's shown with both his wives — Jane Heron and Anne Goodman — while his son Edward and grandson Roger occupy the sides. Edward died in 1632 aged 34. Roger died in 1646 aged 19. The monument was set up in 1658. It is very grand and very sad.
Look at Dame Anne's wrist. There's a dark stain and a crack in the alabaster. The village explanation is that Lady Anne was a witch who could turn herself into a cat. A butler at the Hall struck the cat with a cleaver, wounding its paw. When she changed back, she had the mark on her wrist. There was also, apparently, a bloodstain on a kitchen flagstone that wouldn't wash clean. Around 1920, the Countess of Yarborough had the flagstone removed because the maids complained about it.
The Hall itself is gone. Sir Roger built it in 1621; the Pochin family altered it extensively; it burned down in the early hours of 10 February 1942. The 1869 stable block, designed by R. W. Johnson, survives. So does the avenue of mature trees running from South Lodge through the park on the southern edge of the village. It's a good walk — through the parkland, past what's left of the Hall, and into open country along the Leicestershire-Rutland border.
West of the village, the disused Melton to Oakham Canal runs on an embankment that loops under the road between Edmondthorpe and Teigh. It's the kind of industrial archaeology that rewards a detour if you notice it and doesn't punish you if you don't.
The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Edmersthorp — a corruption of the Old English name Eadmer, with Danish origins. In 1086 it had 26 households, putting it in the largest 40 per cent of settlements. By the 19th century, most of the working population were graziers. Only about 500 acres of the parish was arable. The rest was grass.
Edmondthorpe sits about six miles east of Melton Mowbray, off the A606. There's no railway station; Melton Mowbray is the nearest. The village is now part of Wymondham parish, which is an administrative fact that probably bothers someone.
The Smith family, incidentally, weren't always Smiths. They inherited the estate during the reign of Henry VII and changed their name from Heriz. William Ann Pochin paid for the village school to be extensively rebuilt in 1863. The school had first gone up in 1838. The Pochins, the Smiths, the Countess of Yarborough — for a place this small, Edmondthorpe has had a lot of people trying to leave their mark on it. The alabaster stain on Dame Anne's wrist has outlasted all of them.
