Shackerstone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Shackerstone is a village and civil parish in the Hinckley and Bosworth district of Leicestershire, England. It is situated on the Ashby-de-la-Zouch Canal. According to the 2001 census the parish, which also includes the village of Barton in the Beans, had a population of 811.

[edit] History

In the Elizabethan era the Halls were the prominent family in the village. They occupied the hall next to the church.

During the Civil War Shackerstone was near enough to Ashby de la Zouch to attract the attention of both parties. Parliamentary soldiers from Tamworth and Coventry stole horses, including a mare worth ten pounds from Mr. Hall. The local vicar, the Rev. John Hodges, was ejected from the living in 1646 and brought before the parliamentary sequestration committee for deserting his parish to join the royalist garrison at Ashby for four months. The commissioners charged him with frequenting the village alehouse on Sundays, and of being “a companion with fidlers and singers".*[1]

In the early eighteenth century John Nichols records a fine church, a water mill and an absentee parson, Dr Adamthwaite, a prolific and energetic letter-writer, who was vicar from 1779 to 1811. This was a poor parish. By 1789 time the parson complained that he could not afford to live there, residing instead in Hampton in Arden, in Warwickshire some 24 miles away, where he had a curacy. He claimed that the parsonage had been "miserably beggared" by the previous incument who died insolvent in a gaol. The vicarage was "so entirely let down as that no sign remains of there ever having been one”.*[2]

By 1st April 1805 the population seems to have slightly increased, a local census counting 51 families in Shackerstone, 53 families in Odstone and six in Barton, providing a total population of around 375.

Shackerstone is probably best known nowadays as the home of the Battlefield Line Railway, a preserved steam and diesel museum, that runs trains to Bosworth Battlefield.

Shackerstone also hosts a large family festival, usually in the first week of September that covers every thing from vintage cars to airobatic stunt planes.