The Lutton Walk (5 October 2023): from Domesday to Milk Quotas.

Pictures by Jonathan Brigland; commentary by Ima Olde-Timer

Lutton is a village of uncertainty.  Uncertainty because of the vanishment of a neighbour and a multiplicity of names.  And indeed its location.  It can be called Lutton Bourne, or Luctone or even, Sutton St Nicholas, although to name it thus would be an awful faux pas, show one’s ignorance and cause much merriment among the knowledgeable, not because the name is wrong, but the place is.

Indeed that village (also known as  Lutton near the sea) is actually in Lincolnshire.  We however would not go to such a place.  Most certainly not!   For as can be seen, we visited a Northants village famed for its historic motor museum (see above).

And forsooth, step beyond that on a cold winter’s day in August as our hearty walkers did, and you will find the pond, beneath which lies all manner of whatnot and assorted others.

The village’s name means the farm of perhaps the settlement connected with Luda, or perhaps the farm or indeed settlement on Hluding.  Hlduing means “the loud one” and was the earlier name for the less interestingly called “Billing Brook” of which it has not been said.

Lutton is also on the border of the worlds beyond, which is why the ancients built the A1 highway close by.  But as walkers we would of course have nothing to do with such matters.

For the matters we are to do with include lakes and realms of natural beauty and of those we went a-searching.

Today Lutton is a small village in the East Northamptonshire countryside, and is close to the county border with Cambridgeshire. A linear development with only 62 houses in the two communities, five farms and a church, with one of the farms situated in Lutton’s linked hamlet of Papley.

The hamlet of Papley was once a larger community but then the area was invaded by the tribe of the N Closure, today remembered on a regular basis by the ceremony of the A1 closure in which the Achievement of Nothing Much Moving (one of the 12 Great Achievements mentioned in the Great Book of Certain Things) is preserved for all time.

The village of Lutton is also mentioned in the Domesday Book which was published in 1086, (or coming up to half past  11 in modern timekeeping), whereupon it is called Liditone or Luditone.

Once upon a time this was a wild and jolly place as you can see. .  But it was quickly decided that education was a “bad thing” and so the school was torn down, the teachers burned at a steak and village renamed Mucky Lutton apparently because the road had not been visited by Dr Macadam, and the flooding of the little river, every time it rained.

The final denouement as we writers like to call things, came when milk quotas arrived and everyone decided to pack up and go home.