The packhorse bridge on The Lower Green is still there. Five centuries of feet, hooves, and weather, and the thing stands over Rothley Brook as if it has nowhere else to be. It dates to around 1500, built on the original road from Leicester so travellers could cross without wading the ford — which, remarkably, remained in use until after the First World War. Some people preferred wet feet, apparently.
Anstey sits on the northern edge of Leicester, close enough to the city that the bus gets you there in twenty minutes, far enough that Bradgate Park's 830 acres of deer and ruins start more or less where the village ends. The A46 runs to the south. There is no railway station. The number 74 bus connects to Leicester city centre, and that is your lot for public transport.
The Crown Inn on Bradgate Road is the sort of pub that picks a lane and then picks three more. Buffalo chicken wings come in Bull's Eye Original BBQ, Hoisin, or Spicy Firecracker sauce. There's macaroni cheese in crispy crumb with BBQ sauce and dressed salad. Mondays are two-for-one burgers, Tuesdays two-for-one pizzas, Wednesdays and Thursdays two-for-one cocktails, and Fridays half-price prosecco and gin. Dogs are welcome. Children are welcome. There is a beer garden, real ale, Sky Sports, and WiFi. Food runs from noon to nine daily.
The Bradgate takes its name from the park and plays it straighter — stone-baked pizzas, Sunday roasts, pub classics, with fresh local produce and vegan and gluten-free options. It serves seven days a week.
Bradgate Park itself is free to enter and hard to leave. An 830-acre medieval deer park, it contains the ruins of Bradgate House, ancestral home of Lady Jane Grey, who was queen of England for nine days. The Old John folly tower sits on the high ground, visible from half the county. Walking routes climb to Beacon Hill or wind through into Swithland Wood. You could spend a morning. You could spend a week of mornings.
St Mary's Church has a medieval tower from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, three stages with gargoyles and battlements. The rest was rebuilt in 1846. The churchyard holds the remains of a fifteenth-century preaching cross — socket stone and part of the shaft — which has its own Grade II listing. Until 1867, Anstey wasn't even a proper parish; it was a chapel annexed to Thurcaston.
The Domesday Book records the village under Hugh de Grandmesnil. The name comes from the Old English "Hanstige," meaning a narrow forest track, which tells you what this place looked like before anyone built on it.
Anstey is also, by long tradition, the birthplace of Ned Ludd — the man, possibly imaginary, who smashed two stocking frames in 1779 and gave his name to an entire movement. No documentary evidence of him survives, but the village has Ned Ludd Close, and by 1845 three hundred of its residents were framework knitters themselves. The first boot and shoe manufacturer arrived in 1863. The village has always made things, or broken them.
Rothley Brook still runs through the lower part of the village, under both the packhorse bridge and the older King William's Bridge. Two medieval crossings in one village. Most places would be pleased with one.
