British Travel Journal | Autumn/Winter 2023

Squeezed in between Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire
and Leicestershire, Rutland might be pint-sized but it really
packs a punch in the charisma stakes.
Sharing the same geology as the Cotswolds, its rolling
green hills are studded with honey-coloured stone villages
cloaked with a raw charm the chichi Cotswolds hasn’t seen
for decades. And it’s relatively crowd free.
The county, whose motto multum in parvo means ‘much
in little’, also comes with a spectacular centrepiece in the
form of Rutland Water. Covering more than 3,000 acres,
it’s one of the largest constructed lakes in Europe. This
watery playground of the East Midlands is a place where
you can windsurf, sail or fish its waters, go for a serene
hike along its shores, or gaze skyward at ospreys and red
kites gliding overhead.
We’re here to cycle around its perimeter, all 23 miles
of it. But before that, a chance to scope the watery world
from the deck of the Rutland Belle, learning a bit about the
history of this reservoir, created by flooding two villages in
the 1970s.
We chug to the water’s most famous landmark,
Normanton Church, which might seem to float on water
from a distance but which we can see standing on its
own shored-up peninsula as we approach. Saved from
36 BritishTravelJournal.com