Oakham; Friday, 02 July, 2021

I worked out of the hotel in Peterborough for the morning, finishing just before checkout time at midday, and then wandered over to the station to catch my train to Oakham, which only took about 30 minutes to make the journey. A quick walk across town to the hotel, checkin, and then up in my room and back to work for the rest of the day.

I finished just after 5pm, powered down the laptop, grabbed the camera and went out for a wander around Oakham.

Oakham is the largest town in the county of Rutland – which is a polite way of saying it’s pretty small. Rutland itself is less than 150 square miles, neighbouring Leicestershire (which it was merged into for 23 years between 1974 and 1997) is nearly six times the size, and Norfolk from the previous weekend is nearly 14 times the size. All to say, Oakham isn’t the kind of town where you need to take a bus to get from one side to the other – which is fortunate, as it also suffers from pretty terrible public transport in the evenings and on Sundays, which I’d only discovered a couple of weeks earlier and had to make special arrangements for.

From the hotel I walked the short distance past the library and over to the market place. The area is surrounded by a nice collection of buildings, and two wooden structures. The smaller of the two provides shelter above the town water pump and the larger of the two – the Butter Cross, houses the town stocks (I’m assuming not still in use!)

From the market it was just a couple of steps across to the impressive All Saint’s church which was still open to have a quick look around before walking down into the neighbouring fields which boarder the mound that Oakham Castle once sat upon.

The bulk of the castle itself is long gone, with just the great hall (great being caveated with the usual – For Rutland – size comparison) remaining inside the walls. Whilst they’re not as impressive (or stable) as they once were, a large part of the castle walls still stand, which you can walk round. Part way round a set of steps have been installed so that you can climb up onto the top of the walls for good views across the castle site, and then descend down into the castle area.

After taking in the castle I wandered back through the centre of town to the hotel and stopped there to freshen up, before heading back out to grab some dinner.