The Sugar Loaf sits on the A606 where it passes through Ab Kettleby, named after Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, which is not the kind of reference you expect from a pub in north Leicestershire. It is probably seventeenth century in origin and looks it — stone walls, a conservatory bolted on the back, a decking area for when the weather cooperates. The food is home-cooked and the portions are not polite. Reviewers mention meat pies overflowing with filling, hand-cut chips made from actual potatoes, and sticky toffee pudding with custard. The belly pork and the ham and Stilton ploughman's both get mentioned often enough to suggest they're reliable. It's open seven days a week, noon to ten.
That is, essentially, the village's commercial offering. There are no specialist shops. Ab Kettleby has 529 people and a pub, and the pub is good, which is the right way round.
The village sits three miles north of Melton Mowbray on gently rolling ironstone country — elevated ground with long views across the Wreake Valley. On a clear day you can supposedly see Boston Stump in Lincolnshire, which is forty-odd miles away and sounds improbable until you stand up here and realise there's nothing in the way. Beacon Hill in Charnwood Forest is the more reliable landmark. Walking routes run out across field paths in most directions, through the kind of quiet agricultural landscape where the main hazard is mud.
If you need a railway station, Melton Mowbray is the nearest. Bus services exist but are limited in the way that rural Leicestershire bus services tend to be limited.
St James the Greater has a spire, a Norman font, and three bells, two of which have been ringing since 1653. There is a wall monument to Everard Digby, dated 1628, decorated with heraldic shields of the Digby and Sacheverell families and an inscription in verse. A kinsman of the same Digby family was involved in the Gunpowder Plot. The church closed in 2006 after subsurface problems — Roman remains beneath the churchyard were undermining the foundations — and didn't reopen until 2013, after the village raised the money itself.
Those Roman remains are worth a sentence. Mosaic tiles and pavement were uncovered during a burial in the 1930s, strong evidence of a villa complex directly beneath the churchyard. The pattern is common enough — a Christian church planted on a Roman site — but knowing it's there, under your feet, changes the way the place feels.
The Domesday surveyors recorded the village as Chetelbi in 1086: Ketil's homestead, from the Old Norse. The "Ab" was tacked on later, after a subsequent landowner, to avoid confusion with Eye Kettleby down the road. The whole settlement amounted to about nine households — seven villagers, six freemen, four smallholders — placing it in the smallest forty per cent of recorded communities. It has not, in fairness, grown enormously since.
From the 1870s to the 1960s, iron ore was extracted from the land around Ab Kettleby, Holwell, and Wartnaby, carried out on mineral railways. The landscape still shows traces if you know what to look for.
The village's most famous resident was a horse. Desert Orchid, the grey steeplechaser who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1989, spent his summers here with the Burridge family — quiet rest between racing campaigns. There is also a listed telephone box, which is a protected example of a rapidly disappearing piece of British street furniture. Between the horse and the phone box, the village has its monuments.
