Family Recollections Of Kirby Muxloe 1913 To 1969

A Memory of Kirby Muxloe.

My memories of Kirby Muxloe date back to 1949, when I was a bridesmaid at my father’s cousin Anne’s wedding at St Bartholomew’s Church. However it is the castle that I remember most, since we had to drive past it to visit her parents, my Great Aunt Nell and Great Uncle Stan in Desford Lane. In 1969 I photographed the Castle when I took my own sons to visit Anne’s sister, Eva, who lived on at the same house after their parents’ deaths.
My father was born in 1913 and he and his parents lived next door to Stan and Nell for the first twenty or so years of his life. He had vivid recollections of the castle. He wrote in his memoirs:
" . . .but above everything else in my early childhood days is the memory of the Castle. It was the anchor of all my cognitive thought. Every concept that I had started from it. My sense of locality began with it. Although I could not see it directly from our house, I was always conscious that it was there. If I ever dared to venture on my own onto Main Street, which was only a few steps away and round the corner in either direction, there was the Castle looming up in my view, silent and long since devoid of any sign of life, but symbolising something which I could not then understand. At this time of my life I never encountered any strangers, so nobody ever asked me where I lived, but I am sure had they done so I would have replied "Near the Castle...”, not "Near the Old Schoolhouse..." nor "At the Ratby Lane corner...""

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