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General
At Leagrave two small trickles of water emerge from concrete culverts, one under a main road, the other from beneath some high rise flats. These are the source of the river Lea (or Lee).
Originally a separate hamlet, the boundaries of Luton were extended in 1928 and 1933 so that it incorporated Leagrave. Not all of Leagrave remains in its original location. One cottage, 57 Compton Avenue, started life in the early eighteenth century as a weatherboarded thatched barn and was then converted into two labourers cottages in the late eighteenth century. Now it has moved to the Chiltern Open Air Museum at Chalfont St. Giles in Buckinghamshire.
The origin of the name is uncertain though it could be derived from the Old English words cleoht and graf meaning ‘light-coloured grove’ or perhaps ‘Lihtla’s grove‘.
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The Horse Shoe
In the seventeenth century a man named Cain was murdered in a field near the Horse Shoe public house in Leagrave Road. His corpse was carried into the pub and the suspected murderer was brought in and made to touch the body. When he did, blood poured from the wound and flooded the floor; enough evidence, so people believed, to prove that he was the murderer. For many years after the event the blood stains would reappear on the floor and then disappear once more.
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