Church Road Egleton Oakham
01572 723447
http://www.oakhamteam.org.uk

St Edmund, Egleton is a church of many mysteries. Open every day, we invite you to visit and experience the presence of this place as a focus of prayer and worship for nearly a thousand years. The history of the building can be seen in the carvings and arches which reveal its Norman origins. A guide book is available to highlight those features which may puzzle - not least the presence of a series of scratch dials on the outer walls of the church, a total said to be the highest in Rutland. This grade one building - now on the At Risk register - is in increasing need of support for work to protect a large maternity home for soprano pipistrelle bats and a planned replacement of the chancel roof. 

A warm and friendly congregation welcomes visitors to services of Holy Communion (Common Worship, traditional) at 9.15am on the first and third Sundays of each month. Services are also held to celebrate special festivals.

Each year, on or about his feast day - November 20 - St Edmund is remembered. A King of East Anglia, Edmund was captured by the Danes after a battle in 869, and refusing to renounce his Christian faith, was shot to death by arrows. A legend surrounds the events that followed his martydom and the eventual arrival of his body at Boedericsworth (Bury St Edmunds) where his shrine was a centre of pilgrimage. A magnificent abbey grew around the saint although little remains of it today.

Small in size, Egleton is an attractive largely stone-built village on the edge of Rutland Water - today known for the Anglian Water Bird Watching Centre and as a place to visit for the many who circumnavigate the water by foot or bicycle.

Although not mentioned in the Domesday Survey the village was one of the five ‘berewicks' of the King's manor of Oakham. These were outlying settlements attached to Oakham. The lords of Oakham Castle held the ‘hamlet' but it is doubtful it had a ‘manor' of its own until 1484 when the manor was granted to Henry Grey, Lord of Codnor. From its earliest days, the church was a chapelry attached to Oakham, served by a curate appointed by the Vicar of Oakham who owned a third of the village tithes. Now it is a separate parish within the Oakham benefice.