5 miles south of Wellingborough

Old stone cottages and houses line Grendon’s long and twisting main street. The village is built on a slope, and the brown-and-grey tower of its 12th-century church is one of the best-known landmarks in the River Nene valley. It pokes up from between thatched and slated roofs, and overlooks an orderly patchwork of outlying fields.

The parish church of St Mary has been added to every century or so. The latest addition is a striking, black-arid-white marble floor put in by a rector in 1914 in memory of his three children. The church also has a 17th-century clock mechanism, which is still in working order.

Grendon Hall is a Queen Anne mansion, once a home of the Compton family, earls and marquises of Northampton. The hail, now owned by the County Council, still has rooms with early-18th-century panelling. Two other notable houses in Grendon are the Grange, built in 1850, with a lantern cupola on its roof, and the gabled, 17th-century Manor Farm House.