History
Twywell is recorded in the Domesday Book as Twowelle but can be dated back to the Iron Age. It is likely that this manor was given to Northman miles ("Northman the knight") in 1013 by King Æthelred II. This Northman is thought to be Northman, son of Leofwine. This charter was preserved in the archives of Thorney Abbey, which in the 1050s was one of the abbeys controlled by Northman's relation Abbot Leofric of Peterborough.
The Manor House Farm dates from 1591 and some of the building material is thought to have come from an old monastery situated between Slipton and Sudborough at a site known as 'Money Holes'.
Twywell was the birthplace of the bluestocking writer Hester Chapone, née Mulso, whose conduct book Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), addressed to a 15-year-old niece, remained influential and regularly reprinted for over fifty years.
The parish of Twywell is low-lying, nowhere rising over 300 ft. above the Ordnance datum. The subsoil is Great and Inferior Oolite. One of the many small streams of the district crosses the parish in the south. Twywell station, on the Kettering and Huntingdon branch of the London Midland and Scottish Railway, lies to the south-east of the village. The parish was inclosed by private Act of Parliament in 1765, and by a Local Government Order, dated 25 March, 1885, the detached portion of the parish, called Curtley, was joined to the parish of Slipton. In 1874, the ironstone deposits in the parish were worked by the Newbridge Iron Ore Co. A number of flint weapons and a few relics of the Roman occupation have been found in the parish. The manor house stands in the village and formerly the family of Mulsho for several generations had a house of some size. There Mrs. Hester Chapone, the essayist and writer of poems and pamphlets, and daughter of Thomas Mulsho, was born in 1727. The rectory house, a large plain three-story stone building, erected in 1760, stands to the south-west of the church. Here lived Horace Waller, who was rector of Twywell from 1874 to 1895, and is known as an explorer in Africa. On his return to England he took a very active part in the movement against the slave trade in East Africa, and wrote many works on Africa.
There are a few two-story 17th-century stone houses in the village; one at the south end with a mullioned bay window on the ground floor has a panel in the gable inscribed T H A 1663, and the cottage now used as the post office is dated 1660. Another house with thatched roof has mullioned windows and a good four-centered doorway, and west of the church is a picturesque, but much modernised, 17th-century farmhouse with stone-slated roof and wooden dormers; attached to it is a rectangular dovecote with end gables and lantern. Another dovecote of the same character stands in a field farther north.
Number 278 in a series of caches where a red telephone box is in close proximity to a post box.
The only rule is that they have to be able to be photographed together, and the phone boxes have to be red.
The Fine Pair series was originally started by wizardsmum. If anybody would like to place 'A Fine Pair' of their own please do, I would just ask that you let matt2dk know first so he can keep track of the numbers and locations to avoid duplication.He also keeps a public Bookmark List of this series so once your cache is published please contact him via his profile page to have yours added.