Walking into Oakham’s old town centre, a blue plaque on a stone cottage caught my eye. It commemorated former resident Jeffrey Hudson (1619-1682), the ‘smallest man from the smallest county in England’. Hudson, I later leaned, was a metre-high court dwarf, decreed a ‘wonder of the age’ for his well-proportioned tiny size. So a bit like Rutland itself. Rutland is the country’s smallest historic county by some margin and, hovering in the landlocked midlands, one many outsiders struggle to place on – much in little.
