Collyweston

Collyweston is a village and civil parish in North Northamptonshire, about three miles southwest of Stamford, Lincolnshire, on the road (the A43) to Kettering. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 census was 514.

Geography
The village is on the southern side of the Welland valley east of Tixover. The River Welland, at the point nearby to the northwest, is the boundary between Rutland and Northamptonshire. Ketton and Collyweston railway station was closed in 1966.

Collyweston is currently served by buses on the Stamford–to–Peterborough via Duddington route. The Jurassic Way and Hereward Way pass through the village to the north, crossing the Welland at Collyweston Bridge, near Geeston.

The A47 road passes through the parish to the south, with Collyweston Great Wood to the south. The road from the A47, continuing in a straight line to the village is called Kingscliffe Road.

Nature reserve
The local Wildlife Trust has a fifteen-acre nature reserve at Collyweston Quarries where Lincolnshire limestone was quarried, to the north of the A43. This has the pyramidal orchid, common dodder, greater knapweed, common rock-rose, common bird's foot trefoil, and clustered bellflower. Birds found there include the European green woodpecker and glowworms are found there in the summer.

There is also an SSSI at Collyweston Great Wood.

History
The village's name means 'West farm/settlement'. Colin is a pet-form of Nicholas who held the manor in the 13th century. An alternative name for the village may be "Colyns Weston", in 1396.

A pub on Main Road is called 'The Collyweston Slater', owned by Everards Brewery. New houses have been built down a road called 'Collyns Way'. The parish church is St Andrew's, a Grade II* listed building.

John Stokesley (1475–1539), an English clergyman who was Bishop of London during the reign of Henry VIII was born in Collyweston. In the late sixteenth century, the place gave its name to the manner of wearing the mandilion 'Colley-Weston-ward' for unknown reasons.

Collyweston Palace
Collyweston Palace was the home, in later life, of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), the mother of Henry VII. In 1498, though still married, she made a vow of chastity and chose to live at Collyweston.

The household of Margaret Beaufort at Collyweston, her chapel, and New Year's Day festivities at Collyweston with Princess Cecily were described for Mary I by Henry Parker, 10th Baron Morley, who had served Margaret Beaufort as a teenager.

New furnishings for Lady Margaret Beaufort's apartments at Collyweston were embroidered with her heraldic badges of roses and the portcullis by Sebastian Mussheka in 1498, and she donated textiles and vestments to the parish church at Collyweston, including a then old-fashioned green damask cope. Margaret Tudor (1489–1541) came to Collyweston in 1503 on her way to join her husband James IV of Scotland. One of her attendants, Elizabeth Zouche married Gerald FitzGerald, 9th Earl of Kildare (1487–1534) at the palace, and six Spanish dancers performed a morris dance.

In 1506, a priest, John Stokesley, was brought before Lady Margaret Beaufort's manor court charged with the crime of baptising a cat as part of a charm to find treasure. An inventory of Margaret Beaufort's wardrobe at Collyweston was made after her death in 1509. She had 20 fur-edged black gowns – some with trains, and some without them, a style known as "round".

The building was dismantled in about 1640, leaving little trace. In 2023, its location was confirmed using ground-penetrating radar to find the main cluster of buildings, and the footings of walls were unearthed.

"Collywest"
The term 'collywest' (or 'colleywest', or 'collywesson') is a derivative of Collyweston that may be used to describe anything a bit crooked, awry, wobbly, or generally disordered, or meaning opposite, wrong way, or contrary. It has been suggested that when slate had been quarried in Collyweston, the good-quality, even pieces were sold, leaving the crooked poorer-quality pieces to use for the village's houses, making for very disordered rooftops. In the northern US, the term 'galley-west' is widely held by US dictionaries to be a derivative of 'collywest'.