Ledshire

Ledshire was a fictional county in the north of England in two novels by Susan Pleydell, Summer Term (1959) and A Young Man's Fancy (1962). It was also the name of a county in the Miss Silver novels (1928-61) of Patricia Wentworth.

The county in the Pleydell novels

The Ledshire of Susan Pleydell was a small, almost entirely agricultural county.[1] Its main (presumably, county) town, on the River Ledd, was Ledenham,[2] the location of a 400-year-old boys' public school that was the focus of the novels. Ledenham contained "two or three unexpectedly good hotels and shops", as well as a Regal cinema.[3] A major landmark was Leyburn Castle, seat of the Earls of Leyburn, which served as a sort of "county headquarters", containing, among other things, a library, art gallery and museum.[4]

The industrial town of Snaydon, just outside the county, some 15 miles from Ledenham, via the village of Thaxley, maintained "steady growth" and caused Ledshire to maintain "a particularly nervous eye".[5] The spearhead of Snaydon's advance was Sir Arthur Hinton-Brigg, chairman of Hinton-Brigg Ltd, who, just after the Second World War, had married into a Ledshire landowning family and bought Thaxley Manor, his wife's childhood home.[6] (The Grampians are close by and Snaydon is described as being "over the border". It is therefore a reasonable conclusion that Ledshire abuts the Scottish borders and that Snaydon is just inside Scotland).

A small county like Ledshire would probably have been affected significantly by the reorganisation of local government in the 1970s. Under the new arrangements some counties, notably Rutland, disappeared, while others, such as Hereford and Worcester, were merged.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Susan Pleydell (1962) A Young Man's Fancy, chapter 5
  2. ↑ There is no connection with Leadenham (sic), a village in Lincolnshire.
  3. ↑ Pleydell (1959) Summer Term, chapter 1
  4. ↑ A Young Man's Fancy, chapter 18
  5. ↑ Ibid., chapters 5 & 9
  6. ↑ A Young Man's Fancy, chapter 5
  7. ↑ John Campbell (1993) Edward Heath: a biography, p.380
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