The village cross at the top of Church Street is where you get your bearings. From here the road drops south past stone and brick cottages, a stream cuts through the middle of things, and the fields beyond still carry the corrugated lines of medieval strip farming. Appleby Magna sits on the western edge of Leicestershire, just inside the National Forest, in countryside that's been farmed since before anyone was writing it down.
The Crown Inn is the pub you want. It's a one-room local on Church Street, next to the church, with a real fire, Marston's Pedigree, and two rotating guest ales. There's no kitchen to speak of — cobs at weekends, and occasional pop-up pizza nights that seem to generate a disproportionate amount of goodwill. The beer garden is large. Dogs are welcome. The Pigeon Club meets here. It's CAMRA-listed, which in a village this size counts as an institution. They run beer festivals in February and August, the February one being an act of either optimism or defiance depending on the weather.
The Black Horse, also on Church Street, is one of three pubs still going. The Appleby Inn over in Appleby Parva makes the third. Others have been less fortunate. The Red Lion was demolished to build an M42 junction.
St Michael and All Angels is Grade I listed and sits on a site that's had something sacred on it since the Romans. A Roman temple first, then a wooden Saxon chapel, then stone. The oldest surviving part is St Helen's Chapel, which predates the fourteenth century. Sir Edmund de Appleby, who fought at Crécy, paid to enlarge the nave. Joyce de Appleby, from the same family, was burned as a Protestant martyr under Mary I. The family held the manor from the reign of Henry II until 1560, which is a good run by anyone's standards.
Walk south from the church and you pick up the Appleby Riverside Walk, which follows the stream through the village and out past ridge-and-furrow pasture. Sence Valley Forest Park is nearby — a lake, mixed woodland, short loops. The National Forest Way passes close to the parish on its route between Sence Valley and Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
The Moat House is the building that stops you. A stone gatehouse from Henry VIII's reign, largely unaltered, with a timber-framed black-and-white house behind it. Pevsner country. It's considered the best-preserved medieval moated manor in Leicestershire, and it looks it.
Sir John Moore, born here in 1620, became Lord Mayor of London and asked Christopher Wren to design him a school. Wren obliged. It was finished in 1697 and still stands, now the village primary school. A Wren building full of children learning phonics is not a bad legacy.
The name itself is half English, half Danish — 'aepel' for apple tree, 'by' for village. Orchards survived in the parish until the 1960s. The Domesday Book recorded it as Aplebi: eight villagers, roughly nine households, straddling the old county border with Derbyshire.
Tamworth station, on the West Coast Main Line, is the nearest rail link. Buses run to Tamworth and Ashby. The M42 is close, which the Red Lion found out the hard way.
On a weekday afternoon the stream still runs through the middle of the village, the ridge-and-furrow still shows in the low light, and the Crown is still serving Pedigree by the fire.
