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Welcome to the Village Link website. We’re a small not for profit organisation staffed by volunteers and cannot justify the expense of an SSL certificate. This certificate is what changes a web address from http to https. Google will soon change how they label sites; instead of labelling sites with a certificate as secure they will label sites without one as insecure. We keep this site as secure as we can and is as secure as it ever has been. Please do not be put off!

Take a little time to browse our pages and discover what goes on where and when in our area. Within our pages you can also find out who does what locally. If you would like to contribute anything to any of our pages, including your favourite picture from where you live in our area, please follow the links on the Contact Us page. We would love to carry all the info for your local club or association and best of all, it’s all for free!

The map on the left is fully navigable plus you can zoom in and out by using the controls in the top left corner and if you view the larger map you can enter street view by dragging the little yellow person onto the map to where you want to view and go for a virtual walk around our streets and lanes.

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What’s on...

Find out what’s on where and when. Click here to jump to February and March or navigate to the Events Diary pages to choose which month to view. It’s worth checking future months, especially if you’re planning an event and want to avoid a clash.


Regular Events:

Monday mornings - MMM,  evenings - Knitwits, Guilsborough.

Tuesday evenings - Creaton Singers.

 Thursdays mornings - Indoor Bowls, Creaton.

Sunday morning & Tuesday evenings -Tennis, Guilsborough

Tuesday & Thursday evenings  - Badminton, Guilsborough.

Thursday evening - Nia, Guilsborough

Last Saturday of the month - Painting at Thornby.

CHRISTMAS CREATIVES COMPETITION WINNERS

with their prizes ...

Left to right from top:
Sophie, Katie, Chip, Diana, Oscar, Libby, Florence, Lucas, Coen and Eleanor. Well done all, and thanks for taking part!


PARISH CHURCHES NEED MORE SUPPORT


Despite welcoming more people over Christmas than for some years, the Upland Churches are suffering from a lack of support in their running.

In October it was reported that the church of St James in Hollowell was desperately seeking ways to keep the church open. In her letter in this issue of Village Link, Rev Allison Twigg talks about how each church is managed by a voluntary council but at the moment fewer and fewer people are coming forward to help. You can read the Rev Allison’s letter on the Church News page.

From Creaton to Journeys into the Heart of Football

They say that it takes a village to raise a child. And apparently, it takes the village of Creaton to raise an author. Local boy done good, Ruben Clark - writing as RM Clark - has recently released his debut book with the respected independent sports publishers, Pitch Publishing.

Winner Stays On: England with The FA Cup for a Compass is a unique journey through the heartlands of English football, using only fixtures from the 2022/23 FA Cup to plan the route. With original research and rich, thought-provoking prose, the book blends elements of travel writing with football culture and barstool sociology. It is also funny (Sometimes).         Continued on Creaton’s Village News page.

Cottesbrooke

Head Gardener ‘niffing’ on Gardeners World.

To find out more, Cottesbrooke’s Village News page.


GUILSBOROUGH FIRE STATION…………NOT JUST FOR GUILSBOROUGH


Guilsborough has had a fire station in the village for over 75 years. Currently there is a crew of seven firefighters responding from the station to all manner of incidents in the local vicinity and throughout the county, including road traffic collisions, fires, animal rescue, assisting the ambulance service, flooding, and many more.

The crew train on Monday evenings 7-9pm, and then respond via mobile pagers when required to attend incidents. This year the stations crew have responded to over 90 incidents countywide.

If you feel that you would like to be a part of the fire service, the station is always looking for new recruits.If you live or work within eight minutes of the station and would like to help provide an essential service to the local community, you will be supported and guided throughout the process. Further information and an initial interest can be expressed and submitted on the website, www.oncallfire.co.uk, or simply call in at the station on a Monday evening between 7-9pm, for a chat.


Saxon Spires Patient Participation Group

January 2024

The SSPPG is a collaborative team of Patients and Practice

Staff, including GPs and Practice Management.  Practices are required by the NHS to have a PPG

The SSPPG works on behalf of Saxon Spires Practice at both Brixworth and Guilsborough Surgeries. Our meetings alternate between the two sites. We meet to review issues and identify ways of assisting the practice in its effort to improve the services available.  Our next meeting is at Brixworth Surgery on Wednesday 21st February at 5pm.

The Practice serves a large rural area and our group membership aims to reflect the interest of patients from a number of villages. We would like to see more representation from Guilsborough  and the surrounding area. Please get in touch if you would like to get involved.

Watch our Saxon Spires Patient Participation Group Facebook page for regular announcement on all activities or for more information drop us an email on ssppg2022@gmail.com or phone 01604 880552



BIRDING NOTES

A WAXWING WINTER

At the end of 2022 my piece in this column was speculatively titled “Will it be a Waxwing Winter?” Alas, it proved not to be. Despite some promising early reports in the north of the British Isles, the roaming flocks that year didn’t generally venture south in any numbers and reports dwindled away as winter progressed. 2023-2024 on the other hand, has turned out to be a vintage Waxwing winter, giving most of us the best chance since 2013 to catch up with this characterful and attractive species. As I write this in the first week of January, we have had recent local reports from Higham Ferrers, Northampton, Corby, Duston and Brixworth – with hundreds more reports from across much of the UK.

Waxwings are annual winter visitors to the British Isles, but generally only scarcely and in small numbers. In some years however, there will be an invasion, or irruption of these birds, with large numbers dispersing from northern mainland Europe, usually due to a shortage of suitable food sources, particularly berries. In irruption years Waxwings are often seen in residential areas or commercial or municipal spaces, where they may be attracted by plantings of berry-bearing plants such as Cotoneaster. A favoured food in their normal wintering grounds is Rowan berries, so they will also often be found in Rowans, or other Sorbus trees, including garden varieties.

Waxwings can be very confiding and tend to be mobile and lively, so they are often easy to see; birds in a group will also frequently call - a high-pitched and far carrying “siirrrr”, with a pleasing trilling, silvery quality. When seen well, Waxwings are unmistakeable, being greyish pink overall, with a black bib and eye mask, a rufous cinnamon-coloured undertail, black, white, yellow and red wing markings and a yellow end to the black tail. They also have a prominent crest, which may be flattened in flight or at rest, but often raised conspicuously when the bird is active. The name Waxwing derives from the fact that small extended red tips to some of the wing feathers can appear like blobs of sealing wax. When not feeding, flocks can rest quietly in treetops and bushes, and may be easily overlooked, so it’s worth checking any group of Starling-sized birds seen in these habitats.

The full name of the Waxwing most often seen in the British Isles is the Bohemian Waxwing, Bombycilla garrulus. There are two other species in the genus: the Cedar Waxwing, an extremely rare visitor from North America and the Japanese Waxwing, a species found in north-east Asia.

Waxwings may be present in the UK until March, and flocks will continue to be mobile as trees and bushes become stripped of their berries, so you may be lucky enough to catch up with these striking birds as they pass through Northamptonshire before heading off to their Scandinavian breeding grounds.


Jon Cook.

https//joncookbirding.wordpress.com

Buckby Library & Hub

See the latest news from Buckby Library & Hub by clicking here

Local news from the Northamptonshire villages of Cold Ashby,

Cottesbrooke, Creaton, Guilsborough, Hollowell & Teeton and Thornby.

Last updated Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Copy deadline for next printed edition: Monday 4th March ‘24


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