Oakham; Sunday, 04 July, 2021

I hadn’t done as diligent research when I booked this trip as I normally do, so it wasn’t until a couple of weeks before travelling that I discovered there were no buses from Oakham on a Sunday, and only a limited railway service that didn’t start until after lunchtime. So in an attempt to at least be able to see some things I’d hired a taxi for a couple of hours.

It turned out to be an excellent investment as my driver for the morning, Pete, gave me an excellent tour of the county taking in several different parts of Rutland Water, including stopping at the spectacular Normanton Church, and taking in the Welland Valley Viaduct – the largest brick built rail viaduct in the UK.

After several photo stops he finally dropped me off at the entrance to Burghley House, which was my destination for the afternoon.

I had a quick lunch in the garden café before heading over to the ticket office to checkin for my prebooked time slot for the tour of the house.

I did the tour of the house and then had a bit of a wander around the grounds – intermittently stopping to dive for cover as another of the frequent hefty showers passed through. I then headed over to the Garden of Secrets to have a look round that.

In the original plan for the day I was going to walk back from the house into the pleasant Georgian town of Stamford that the house and park is on the edge of, have a look round that and then get a train back to Oakham about 5pm. On my way walking through the grounds I happened to check twitter to see that the railway line into St Pancras, my route home, was slowly dissolving into chaos and my booked train would be replaced by a bus for a hefty part of it’s journey, but my ticket would be valid on an earlier train.

So instead of wandering round Stamford I made a beeline to the train station to catch the 4pm train, headed back through Oakham, picked up my luggage and was back on the platform for the train an hour earlier than originally planned.

It turned out to be a good idea for several reasons – the first being I made a London train at Leicester that was fast to St Pancras, so I ended up back in London much earlier than planned, but also because it meant I was onboard the train at the same time as one of the heaviest thunderstorms of the weekend passed through with a torrential downpour that I would have been caught in if I’d stuck to the original plan.