📍 Are you from the Whitwick, Thringstone, Agar Nook or Coaville area? 🌳 Looking to connect with nature? 🌐 Take at look at these upcoming Listening Wood workshops that we are supporting: www.charnwoodforest.org/listening-wo...

⛏️ There has been a quarry at Bardon Hill for at least 400 years. 📷 This photo, taken in 1910, shows how the quarried, hard, igneous rocks are overlain by layers of softer sandstones from the Triassic period (see left below trees) ©️ NERC

Atmospheric tree at last night's brilliant #Geopark in the Dark event. Second image is models of local fossils painted by children. Many thanks @charnwoodforest.bsky.social

Coming up, Heritage Hub 2026 at University of Leicester. We are looking forward to being there, sharing news of our activities and just talking local history and heritage

Viewing talk by Simon Bradley for @visitchurches.bsky.social about Pevsner's county architectural guides. Key sources included VCH: “the information it contains is impeccable". Ongoing VCH work in turn benefits from Pevsner's work and its updates by Simon & others: thank you. @vch-home.bsky.social

The Vaughan City Explorers will meet for a bespoke guided walk around the Welford Cemetery on SUNDAY MARCH 22. Note that this visit COSTS £6. We will meet at the information centre at 12.30 for the 1pm start (note the time).

YOU GUYS!!! Hidden in this image is an intermediate technology--this is a STATIONARY SEMI-MECHANICAL haybind!! Its job was to compress the hay into a long, rectangular column. Note the women on either side hand-tying off bales, and one loading the hopper. These women were trail-blazers!

🌋 The rocks of Charnwood Lodge are famous for their volcanic blocks, likely deposited in debris flows from a nearby volcano. 📷 This photo was taken in 1896 by W. W. Watts. He would go on to become a fellow of The Royal Society and president of The Geological Society. ©️ NERC

I can recommend this. Susan has spent a long time studying place names in Charnwood, and is now working with us at Leics VCH, leading our latest project in Charnwood Geopark, thanks to funding from Charnwood Geopark and National Lottery Heritage Fund

#Skystorians - New to medieval and early modern #Palaeography? Looking to improve your skills? Then the 49th Latin and Palaeography Summer School - to be held in #Birmingham (rather that Keele, as previously), might just be for you. Please share widely.

Charnwood Forest Geopark - a statement on dinosaurs:

It is self-evident looking around cities, towns and the smallest villages that there are places of worship no longer used by those that built them. 🗃️ Some, of course, are houses. Others remain in devotional use. Some examples from our volumes, supplemented by other information - a short thread 🧵

Help save Leicestershire’s Bronze Age Torc❗️ We've started a crowdfunding campaign to ensure that a 3,000-year-old golden torc discovered last year near Harborough can be saved and brought back to the county - but we only have until mid-March to do it! Visit www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-save-...

Our next zoom talk. Booking info on the poster - all welcome.

🫏 Take a trip to our Sandham Bridge geosite, and discover this beautiful packhorse bridge. 🌐 Plan your visit now: www.charnwoodforest.org/location/san...

William Paget died in 1865. He founded a large hosiery business in Loughborough, was part owner of a coal mine & a corn milling business & farmed c.700 a. land in S. Notts. How long did it take to get probate? 3 weeks! 22 days to be precise, but one of those days was Christmas Day. How times change

The Generator: Stories and Memories - an oral history project supported by @heritagefunduk We’ve captured the voices, recollections and experiences of those who studied, worked and created in the historic Packe Street building over the decades.

Layers of history revealed in the walls, floors + surfaces of our Art Deco building. each texture is a chapter in The Generator’s journey from power station> art college> community arts venue.

Our February Forum will be online, 15 Feb at 6.15pm. Dr Miriam Gill will be talking on ‘Tantalizing Fragments: Piecing Together Traces of a Lost Coventry Mystery Play’ To find out more👇 vaughan.coop/course/febru...

👍 Thank you to our fabulous volunteers who helped install a Geopark Information Hub in Woodhouse Eaves yesterday. 👉 The Hub also hosts the Woodhouse Eaves Earthquake Geosite, with interpretation on the tremor of 1893. Plan your visit: www.charnwoodforest.org/location/woo...

Save the date and cfp. A grand day out at the beautiful, grade 1 listed Wymeswold Church, Leics (UK). @eccleshistsoc.bsky.social @leicsvcht.bsky.social @leicsarchhissoc.bsky.social @churchmonuments.bsky.social

Not gone back to work yet? Looking for a new history walk in Leicestershire? Look no further, we have prepared two in Nanpantan nwrg2.uk/heritage/

⭐️ Recap of 2025 - Our Biggest Stories of the Year ⭐️ 👉 In September Melinda Bell discovered the Candelabra Coral Fungus at Copt Oak, Charnwood Forest - this first time this species has been recorded in Leicestershire. 🌐 Read more on the BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A fantastic little book this - Jane's letters, with observations on social life, the state of the roads, the practices of the parish church and much else - add insights into a village now completely different to the one she knew. Pretty much the only building left from her time is the church. 🗃️

Thornton is also one of the Leicestershire places our first group of volunteer history researchers will be investigating as part of a project funded by Charnwood Forest Geopark and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. More at www.charnwoodforest.org/new-local-hi... @vch-home.bsky.social

Victorian Entertainment. On this day in 1865, in this Sunday school room in #Loughborough, the Revd C.C. Coe read Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol 'without intermission for two hours'. (British Newspaper Archive) #localhistory @vch-home.bsky.social

Our latest Newsletter is now available to download. See leicestershirehistory.co.uk?page_id=3681 Find out more about our new project in the Charnwood Forest Geopark area (and thanks to them and to National Lottery for funding this).

A great blog from @ihr.bsky.social director, @clairelanghamer.bsky.social advocating 'History by Doing', bridging the gaps between the histories of people and places where we live, and work and those universities teach/research and delve into: they're all one. 🗃️ You want examples? A short 🧵

#Talk: 'From Nation to Local: Re-Discovering England’s Places through #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems'. What happens to our understanding of the nation when we start at the very smallest scale? Friday 28 November, 3pm, University of Leicester - all welcome! www.englishlocalhistory.org/wp/2025/09/2...

We had a great pilot session for our new school workshops! If your KS3-5 students would enjoy a free workshop exploring Magna Carta & the Making of History (&featuring fab primary sources) contact [email protected]. Scheme kindly supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Farrer & Co.

Bit of a competition going on yesterday among the fallen oak leaves in Victoria Park - who will collect the most acorns?

We have amazing minerals in Charnwood Forest! 🔷 Azurite 🟩 Malachite They both contain copper, but with vividly different colours! 📍 New Cliffe Hill Quarry 🏛 Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Can be those more than a century old too - e.g. school log book started in the 1890s that continues until the book runs out of pages in the 1930s.

Was just wondering when #Sainsbury's opened in Loughborough, and found the wonderful Sainsbury archive online, with press release from Jan 1985, brochure and lots of photos www.sainsburyarchive.org.uk/catalogue/se...

I love the feeling of stillness in the Outwoods, and the birdsong (but perhaps not so much birdsong in the rain).

Manorial rolls are vital sources for medieval settlement history, and many survive, but unfortunately many are now in the USA. Documents recording the medieval history of several Leicestershire settlements are in the Huntington library, California.

This is really interesting - taking the sort of work we do (analysing historic documents and landscape elements, buildings, and place names), and using that to attempt to reconstruct a village, a place, as it was 700 years ago. #Skystorians

👩🏫 Are you involved in a school or educational group in and around Charnwood Forest? 📆 Join us on Nov 20th for our next Education Hub Event, with networking and workshops on Geopark resources. 🌐 Learn more and book your place: www.charnwoodforest.org/event/autumn...

Wonderful photos, past of the historic record of a changing industrial landscape

Very pleased to be supporting this project with a talk about our experiences in Leicestershire and sources for 19th- and early 20th-century local history

💥12 months ago Britain's last coal-fired power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, shut down after 50 years powering the national grid. We can now confirm that C20's listing application for Ratcliffe's 8 cooling towers has been rejected by DCMS, while their demolition has been approved.

This is good news. There's a huge amount of very useful information in there but the Record Commission version takes a while to understand. With the outreach activities too this is a very welcome project

It's amazing to think that there are different products from Loughborough to be found all over the world! lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2021/04/loug...

#ICYMI - a neglected (day we say actually forgotten?) history of inland industrial tourism in rural #Leicestershire. This work, the result of community collaboration with @leicsvcht.bsky.social takes in the little crossroads community of #Nanpantan, its farms, pubs and attractions before WW1. 🗃️

Come & hear me speak in Leicester on Fri 28 November, 2025. 'From Nation to Local: Re-Discovering England's Places through #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems'. Thanks to my friends at the Centre for Regional and Local History + the Centre for Urban History for the invitation. All welcome! Link in AltText.

A tiny snapshot of a tiny community that had - as it happens - forgotten this element of its past. Working with @leicsvcht.bsky.social, the people of Nanpantan, have rediscovered its heritage as a place of leisure for the growing town of Loughborough and its labouring people. #LocalHistory 🗃️

What were holidays like before statutory holiday entitlements and modern transport enabled workers in the middle of the country to get to the seaside? Our recent work at Nanpantan (towards our forthcoming Loughborough history) threw light on this. Find out more at blog.history.ac.uk/2025/09/the-...