Sitting in the north-eastern corner of Leicester, Hamilton is a modern housing estate that takes its name from a deserted medieval village once belonging to the civil parish of Barkby Thorpe, just beyond the city boundary. It forms part of the Humberstone and Hamilton electoral ward, which also takes in Humberstone, Humberstone Garden City, and Netherhall.
The Humber Stone
One of the area’s most unusual features is the Humber Stone, a granite monolith of uncertain origin – possibly deposited during a glacial period – that lies in a field in Hamilton. The stone gives Humberstone its name, first recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ‘Humerstane’, meaning ‘Hunbeorht’s stone’. Until 1750 it was fully exposed, but a farmer then cut it down and buried the remainder. It was partially uncovered again in 1878, at which point its volume was estimated at around 200 cubic feet, suggesting a weight of approximately 15 tonnes. It was thought to align with a nearby stone called St John’s Stone to mark the direction of sunrise at midsummer or at Beltane. In the 1980s the stone was made accessible to the public once more, though it was later fenced off when the Leicester north ring road was constructed, and a sign explaining its history was placed at the site.
Humberstone Village and St Mary’s Church
The older settlement of Humberstone has been occupied for many centuries. St Mary’s Church retains part of an original cob wall and contains a thatched cruck cottage nearby dating from a comparable period. The tower and chancel walls are medieval, while the chancel windows were added in the nineteenth century. The rest of the church was rebuilt between 1857 and 1858 to designs by Raphael Brandon, who used locally sourced Humberstone alabaster for the carved capitals in the nave. Inside, a stone slab bears an incised image of a knight, taken from the tomb of Richard Hotoft, who died in 1451. Main Street has two houses known as the Manor: one dating from the sixteenth century, later enlarged in the eighteenth, which originally had a tithe barn that has since been converted into a house; the other built in the eighteenth century to the east of the church. Humberstone’s population stood at 415 at the 1821 census and more than doubled over the following four decades as Leicester expanded outward. The village once had its own railway station on the Leicester branch of the Great Northern Railway, located on Uppingham Road, though it closed in 1962 after years of increasingly limited service.