Eleanor Crosses

On 5th December 1290 Eleanor of Castile Queen Consort England (deceased) body rested at Queen's Cross, Stamford.

Source Stamford Local History Society, Ken Coles 1980.

Stamford's cross stood for approximately 350 years, and to confirm this we have two eye-witnesses. The first was Captain Richard Symonds of the Royalist army, who visited Stamford briefly on his way from Newark to Huntingdon on Saturday August 22nd 1645. He wrote the following in his diary, "In the hill before ye into the towne stands a lofty large cross, built by Edward I in memory of Eleanor whose corps rested there coming from the north. Upon the top of this cross these three shields shields are often carved: England; three bends sinister; a bordure (Ponthieu); Quarterly Castile and Leon".

The second eye-witness is Richard Butcher, Town Clerk. In his survey of Stamford of 1646 he says the following: "Near unto the York highway and about twelve score paces from the town gate which is called Clement Gate, stands an ancient crosse of freestone of very considerable fabric, having many ancient scrutcheons or arms insculped in the stone about it as the arms of Castille and Leon quartered being the paternal coat of the King of Spain and divers other hatchments belonging to that crown which envious time hath so defaced that only the ruins appear to my eye and therefore not to be described by my pen"

Later Evidence On January 16th 1745 William Stukeley wrote to a fellow antiquarian: "Our surveyor of the turnpike road opened up a tumulus half a mile north of Stamford on the brow of a hill by the roadside and there discovered the foundations of the Queen's Cross, the lower most tier of the steps in tact and part of the second, tis of Barnack stone, hexagonal, the measure of each side thirteen feet so the diameter was thirty feet. It stood on a grassy heath called by the towns people Queens Cross."

In another letter dated 21st December 1754 he wrote that Mr Wying surveyor of the turnpike, was opening a quarry on the left hand side of the road from Stamford to Great Casterton and that he took away a carved stone from part of the pinnacle and other pieces which he put in his Barnhill garden. He says the cross ‘stood on a delicate eminence called Anemone Hill'. He also wrote to the Mercury quite soon after this, on December 26th 1745, reporting the discovery of the remains of a cross ‘on a grassy cliff on the left hand from Stamford to Brigcasterton'.

In 1993 a fragment of Purbeck marble with a rose carved on one of its surfaces was found in the garden of Stukeley House, 9 Barn Hill, Stamford, the home in the 1740s of noted antiquary, William Stukeley. The appearance of this fragment accorded with a description of the upper shaft of the Stamford Eleanor Cross Stukeley claimed to have found in December 1745 on Anemone Hill (upper Casterton Road). Further research confirmed the fragment to be part of Stukeley's find and that he had almost certainly discovered the site of the Stamford Eleanor Cross. This discovery places the Stamford Eleanor Cross in the Foxdale area of Casterton Road, map reference TF01910758 +/- 20 m. and not at the junction of Empingham and Casterton Roads as previously thought.