Even nowadays when the cold winds blow, people in Uppingham – ‘the village of the people on the hill’ – are apt to state that there is no land of equivalent height between the town and the Ural mountains, thousands of miles away to the east. As recently as thirty years ago, the town was cut off by snow for an entire day, while only a small number of flakes fell in fields just a few miles away, but on lower ground. It was a small and close-knit community in 1875, similar in size to many others scattered up and down the length of rural England. Rutland, England's smallest county, is 100 miles north of London. It is only about 15 miles by 15 (95,000 acres in all), and is bordered by the much larger counties of Lincoln-shire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. The county's entire population in the 1871 census was barely 20,000, and Uppingham was its second largest town after Oakham. It had grown up around the crossroads where the north–south road from Nottingham to Northampton (each 35 miles away) meets the east–west route from Peterborough to Leicester (each about 20 miles away). Leicester was an emerging city of 60,000 people, specializing in shoe manufacture. Unlike some provincial towns, Uppingham had not undergone complete transformation before 1800. Its population had grown markedly during the first half of the nineteenth century, but the increase had slowed to a halt since. Nearly 1,400 at the time of the 1801 census, thereafter it grew steadily, reaching 2,065 in 1851 (of whom just over half had been born there), and 2,176 in 1861. The 1871 figures list 2,601 persons, and by 1875 the total figure is believed to have risen by about another 300 – a significant peak which would be followed by a gradual decline during the coming agricultural depression. There were just under 450 inhabited dwellings.