ELEANOR CROSSES

7:10 Harby, Nottinghamshire: The sun is rising, casting long shadows over a fairly flat and featureless landscape. I am standing by a road sign welcoming me to the village. What is unusual is that the sign contains the image of a queen of England, for it was here, in December 1290, that Eleanor of Castille, the wife of Edward I, breathed her last. Royal accounts show that she had been ill for some time. As I come from a village that saw the demise of Edward’s great, great, great, great grandson, Richard III, I am interested to see how the village will mark the passing of a queen. Well, the road sign for a start, but not much else really. Apparently, there is an statue of Eleanor in the church, but the door is firmly locked at this ungodly hour, and I cannot afford to wait : I have a long journey to make.

7:45 Lincoln: When Queen Eleanor died, her body was brought to Lincoln to be embalmed. Her inwards were buried in the cathedral that stands majestically overlooking the city and surrounding countryside, her heart was sent for burial in Blackfriars in London (she had promised it to the monks there!)  and her body was taken back to Westminster Abbey for a royal burial. 

The marriage of Edward and Eleanor was arranged to secure land for Edward’s father ,Henry III, in Gascony, the area around the French city of Bordeaux. By all accounts, they had a happy and loving relationship, with Eleanor following Edward around the country as he held parliaments and waged war against the Welsh and the Scots. He was heartbroken at her death, and ordered that a cross should be erected in every place that her body had rested overnight, on it’s journey to Westminster. The first of these was south of Bargate in Lincoln but nothing of it remains except a fragment of stone that is on display in Lincoln Castle Museum. Certainly the patch of grass in the middle of the busy A15, where the cross once stood, has little to recommend it, so it’s off to the next location.

8:45 Grantham: This is part historical discourse, part personal travelogue, as I set off on a pilgrimage to visit the site of each of the crosses in one day, and very occasionally I actually find a cross to see! I hit Grantham at morning rush hour and of all the places I will visit, it wins the awards for longest traffic light sequences and poorest road signs. With many miles yet to travel, being sent round in circles and held up interminably at red lights during the process, has stressed me out somewhat. The Grantham cross stood on the High Street, outside what is now the Grantham museum. I find a fine statue of Frederick Tollemache, once the town’s MP, but nothing yet to remember the town’s more famous political daughter, Margaret Thatcher, and nothing to signify that the cross ever existed here. I did get to park right next to the museum for free though, so it’s not all bad. Then it’s back in the car for another circuit of the town before I find a way to escape.

9:30 Stamford: The precise locations of the missing crosses are often a matter of dispute. There is even a view that the body may have stopped off in Newark and Leicester rather than Grantham and Stamford. In Stamford, the cross was destroyed during the civil war, but a local historian dug up the site where I am now parked, on what was the Great North Road. Like Grantham, there is nothing to see or to mark out this historic spot (this will be a recurring theme). Whilst the funeral cortege would have stayed at abbeys and convents, the crosses were placed in the centre of the towns and villages or on main roads. This was to maximize the number of people who would have seen them, and subsequently prayed for Eleanor’s soul, the sole reason (sorry) Edward had them constructed. The citizens of Stamford recently commissioned a new Eleanor cross which stands in the market place, but I decide that, a. it looks nothing like the original, b. it is in the wrong place and c. I am behind schedule due to Grantham’s road signage – did I mention this before? – so I set off on the next leg of my journey.

10:15 Geddington: At last - one of the original crosses. There are in fact only three left and this is a truly magnificent edifice, described by English Heritage, who care for it, as a triangular structure with “its canopied statues surmounted by a slender hexagonal pinnacle,” and, “the best-preserved of only three intact survivors.” This being in the middle of a village means I can park right next to it and wander around, taking photographs, and examining the heraldic shields representing the lands and titles held by Edward and Eleanor, along with the effigies of the queen, her features rounded by the wind and rain over the last 700 years, but still recognizable. There used to be a royal lodge here, used when the nobility went hunting in nearby Rockingham Forest, but the queen’s body spent the night within the village church.

11:00 Hardingstone (Northampton): Like the proverbial London bus, you wait for a cross to come along and then you get two together, this one sited by a busy road taking traffic from the M1 into Northampton town centre. It is this cross that is behind my strange excursion today. Before I retired last summer, I went to the theatre in Northampton and, to avoid road-works, I took the more southerly exit from the M1. I was happily driving along when suddenly there, on the side of the road, was the stone cross. “Aha,” I said to those in the car with me, that’s an Eleanor Cross.” As they appeared unimpressed, I went on the regurgitate everything that I had been taught in school 50 years earlier. “I could go and visit all the crosses when I retire,” I thought to myself and, that’s why I am currently busy dodging traffic to get a closer look at the cross.

11:25 Stoney Stratford: This is the first of three sites, situated on or near the old Roman Watling Street, or the A5 to modern day travellers. Stoney Stratford manages to keep its identity separate from its near big brother, Milton Keynes, and as the A5 thunders past the town on a bypass, the main street is busy but relaxed. We’re back to no evidence of the cross again, although allegedly there is a plaque telling of its whereabouts. I have walked up and down the high street a number of times, but can find no plaque. This will be another recurring feature of the day. I have now visited half the sites and it is still only morning: this despite some fairly dodgy decisions regarding which road to take that resulted at one stage in me seeing rather more of Kettering than I actually planned or indeed wanted to.

11:55 Woburn: I will have to visit Woburn again when I have more time to explore properly. It looks a charming place ,with some convenient parking for me in the centre. On the way from Stoney Stratford, I had to pass the entrance to the English Masters golf tournament, except that I misread the signs and went shooting past the bemused stewards through the competitors’ entrance. As the sum total of my golfing expertise consists of a few rounds of crazy golf whilst on holiday, this was rather a shock for me as well as them. Fortunately, I realised before I found myself stepping out onto the first green and, rather sheepishly, had to retrace my route.

12:15 Dunstable: Back on the A5, Dunstable is proving to be the least hospitable of all my destinations so far. I’m sitting in a traffic jam that started outside the town and inching my way towards the site of the cross. I sit in traffic alongside the entrance to the Eleanor’s Cross Shopping Centre, “a bijoux haven of niche shops,” according to the Dunstable Town Council’s website. A few minutes later and I’m still sitting outside the entrance. As I approach the crossroads in the centre of town, everything becomes double yellow lines and with nowhere to park and nothing to see, I decide to carry straight on out of the town and off to the next location.

12:50 St Albans: I’ve been to St Albans three times before. Although I am ‘collecting’ the Eleanor Crosses all in one day, with a friend, I have spent several years visiting every cathedral in England. These were really excuses for a day out together, or we would visit them when staying on holiday with our families in the locality. St Albans has a mighty fine cathedral dedicated, unsurprisingly, to St Alban, the first recorded Christian English martyr. Our exploration of the cathedral had to be aborted, due to a there being a degree ceremony taking place there, but we explored the city and found a lovely market square we felt sure our wives would enjoy. When we revisited a few months later, our wives accompanied us but only gave the market a B minus. It was in the market place that the cross used to stand and a plaque on the clock tower records this fact.

13:20 Waltham Cross: Everything about Waltham Cross pleases me. It has been easy to get to off the M25, easy to find cheap parking and easy to discover that rare artifact – an Eleanor Cross. It stands resplendent in the middle of the town and, because the original effigies were moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum some years ago, the replica images give an idea of what the cross would have looked like back in medieval times. The whole is protected by wire mesh with black railings at the base, but this no way detracts from the impressive sight. From here, I am taking the train to my next destination, and guess what, the station is easy to locate.

14:10 Cheapside: In the very heart of the city of London, just behind St Paul’s is the site of the penultimate cross. By the time the grandly named Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry had decided it would be top of their list of things to destroy in 1643, the cross had already been restored twice. It was festooned with banners welcoming Henry V back after his victory at Agincourt and during Tudor times it got a new coat of guilt every time there was a coronation. One of the more elaborate crosses, it began to become associated with Catholicism and it’s days were numbered. It was the scene of a small riot between those wanting to destroy it and those seeking to protect it; some writers at the time of the civil war wanted it tried for treason and beheaded! Eventually, the committee got to work and down it came. I am looking for a plaque that’s supposed to be here, dodging the myriad of pedestrians that throng the city streets, but in vain. So I head back to the underground and the short journey to…

2:35 Charing Cross: Named after the village of Charing and its Eleanor Cross. The original cross stood where now stands an equestrian statue of Charles I, at the point where Whitehall meets Trafalgar Square. This area used to be the Royal Mews, where monarchs stabled their horses, long before it was turned into the broad expanse of Trafalgar Square. It too came down during the civil war, but when the South Eastern Railway opened a hotel at their Charing Cross terminus, a new cross was erected. Whether this stone reconstruction bears much resemblance to the marble clad original is a matter of conjecture.

As I still have a fair journey back to complete, I decide not to trek down to Westminster Abbey where Eleanor’s journey came to an end, especially as I have seen the tomb a number of times in the past.

So, the quest is over. I have visited 12 sites, seen three original crosses and one reconstruction, will have completed a 400 mile round trip by the time I get home, been down a number of Eleanor Closes and Roads, and spent many happy hours looking at red traffic lights in Grantham.