The Gunpowder Plot was hatched here. Robert Catesby and his fellow conspirators met in the panelled room over the manor’s timbered gatehouse in 1605, before the attempt to blow up Parliament. The Catesbys held Ashby St Ledgers for centuries; in the early 1900s Edwin Lutyens remodelled and extended the manor for Viscount Wimborne. It’s an estate village of thatch and stone, with Long Buckby station about 5km to the east.
