The pubs research agent has returned with exceptional detail. Several findings are too good to leave out:
- **The Courtyard Cafe**: walls made from original Ashby Castle stone, ranked #1 of 62 restaurants on TripAdvisor, Leicester Mercury Best Coffee Shop 2025
- **The Shoulder of Mutton**: has a terracotta mantelpiece carved by French prisoners of war — Ashby was a Napoleonic "parole town"
- **La Zouch Cellars**: run by the same couple since 1982, stocks over 300 specialty whiskies
- **North's Deli**: third-generation family business, over 50 years, does tart au citron and celebration cakes
- **Tollgate Brewery** brews at The Milking Parlour on the Calke Abbey estate — connects two things already in the piece
- **Little India**: BYO, unlicensed — great detail
- **Taste of Thai**: a reviewer who lived in Thailand called it "the best Thai I have had the pleasure of eating in the UK"
- **Bull's Head** was originally called The Swann
Here's the final, polished version incorporating the best of all three research passes:
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The Bull's Head has been serving drinks at 67 Market Street since at least 1598, when it was called The Swann. It's Grade II* listed — the asterisk matters, putting it in the top 5.8% of listed buildings nationally — and the timber-framed walls and ceiling in the snug look like they haven't moved much since Elizabeth I was on the throne. The food is straightforward: fish and chips, steaks, sticky toffee pudding. The landlord, Sam Wallis, personally manages the cellar, and the pub holds Cask Marque accreditation. You eat in a building that predates the King James Bible and nobody makes a fuss about it.
This is Ashby de la Zouch, a market town of about 16,500 people in the northwest corner of Leicestershire, where the main street has a pub from the 1590s at one end and a craft beer bottle shop at the other, and everything in between is more or less what you'd hope for.
Market Street is the spine of the place, and it still works as a proper high street. W Taylor Butchers at number 8 is a family operation selling local meats and award-winning pies — the business recently changed hands when David and Julie Gothard retired, but their son Mat kept it in the family. North's Deli on Bath Street is third-generation, over fifty years old, and does tart au citron, fresh fruit tarts, curated wines, and cheeses alongside the sandwiches and soups you'd expect. There's a covered market hall open Monday to Saturday, and a farmers' and artisan market on the second Sunday of each month on Brook Street. You can walk the whole street in ten minutes, which is about the right length for a high street.
Down a courtyard off Market Street, the Courtyard Cafe occupies a space whose walls are partly formed from the original stone of Ashby Castle — fourteenth and fifteenth century. It was named Leicester Mercury Best Coffee Shop in 2025 and has sat at number one of sixty-two Ashby restaurants on TripAdvisor for some time. The menu runs to homemade breakfasts, a steak and Stilton sandwich, and key lime pie. It's the kind of place you find by accident and then keep going back to.
The drinking, though, is where Ashby quietly excels. The Tap at No.76 is a micropub in a Grade II listed building from the Elizabethan era — it has served time as a farmhouse, a café, and a sweet shop before Tollgate Brewery turned it into what it is now: a small room with well-kept cask and keg beers, pork pies on the bar, no music, no television, and a log-burning stove. Tollgate brews at the Milking Parlour on the Calke Abbey estate, where beer was also made in the 1800s. The Tap won CAMRA North Leicestershire Micro-pub of the Year in 2018 and has been in the Good Beer Guide every year since. Dogs, walkers, and cyclists are welcome, which in practice means muddy boots on flagstones and nobody minding.
A few doors along at 106B, Brew is a craft beer bottle shop and tap room with six permanent keg lines and over 200 beers to drink in or take away. The kegs rotate, so you'll rarely see the same thing on twice. Street food pop-ups arrive on Saturdays, live acoustic music on Sundays. It opens at 4pm Thursday and Friday, 2pm at weekends, and closes Monday to Wednesday, which gives it the feel of a place that knows exactly what it wants to be.
The White Hart, further up Market Street, is a seventeenth-century coaching inn with a story that sounds invented but apparently isn't. A previous landlord — described in old accounts as keeping "a riotous house, the haunt of highwaymen," with cockfighting laid on — kept a bear in the cellar to deal with troublesome customers. The pub still has a bear, though this one is stuffed. Dogs are welcome throughout. There's live music on Saturday evenings, and food is served until 8pm most days.
At the bottom of Market Street, the Shoulder of Mutton is a Wetherspoon now, but the Grade II listed building has a detail that earns its mention: a terracotta mantelpiece surrounding carved timber panels, made by French prisoners of war during the Napoleonic period. Ashby was one of a small number of English parole towns where captured officers were held on their honour, allowed to seek employment and paid a subsistence allowance. They also formed masonic lodges. The pub takes its name from Samuel Adams, a butcher who owned it from 1757 — his family ran it for eighty years.
For something beyond pub food, Market Street has more range than you might expect. Taste of Thai at 84–86 has been praised by a reviewer who lived in Thailand as the best Thai food they'd eaten in Britain, which is either generous or accurate but is certainly a claim. Little India at number 77 is BYO — bring your own bottle — which keeps the bill down and the atmosphere relaxed. Zamani's, in Rushtons Yard just off the main street, has been doing Italian-rooted modern British food since 1996 and has nearly 2,600 reviews at 4.6 out of 5. La Zouch on Kilwardby Street has been run by Geoff and Lynne since 1982 — over forty years — and operates as a coffee house, restaurant, and wine shop all in one building. The retail arm, La Zouch Cellars, stocks over 300 specialty whiskies. For a market town of 16,500 people, this is a serious amount of independent food.
Walk south from Market Street and you reach the castle, which is the reason most people have heard of Ashby de la Zouch at all. The Hastings Tower stands about 24 metres high now, down from its original 27 — the missing three metres were removed by Parliamentary engineers with gunpowder in 1648, their way of ensuring nobody could use the place as a fortress again. You can climb the 98 steps to the top for views across the town and the surrounding countryside, or descend into the underground passage that connects the kitchen basements to the tower base. The tunnel was probably dug during the Civil War as a supply route. It's damp, low-ceilinged, and atmospheric in the way that genuinely old things are atmospheric, without needing to try.
The castle was built from 1474 by William, Lord Hastings, a favourite of Edward IV who was granted a licence to crenellate and promptly set about turning a modest manor house into something on the scale of the great castles of the realm. He created a 3,000-acre deer park to go with it. The Hastings Tower was designed as a self-contained residence — a castle within a castle, with its own kitchen, buttery, pantry, great chamber, and withdrawing rooms. The windows grow larger and more elaborate on each successive floor, reflecting the importance of the rooms within. Hastings never saw it finished. He was summarily beheaded in 1483 on the orders of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, during a council meeting at the Tower of London. Only about half his grand design had been realised.
The castle later hosted Henry VIII, James I, and Charles I. In November 1569, Mary Queen of Scots was detained here under the custody of Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon. During the Civil War it became the most troublesome Royalist garrison in the county, holding out until 28 February 1646, when the garrison finally surrendered and marched out with trumpets sounding, drums beating, and colours flying. Parliament ordered the slighting two years later. English Heritage manages the ruins now.
Next to the castle, St Helen's Church is Grade I listed — a Perpendicular town church with an outstanding collection of Hastings family monuments spanning four centuries. The Hastings Chapel contains an alabaster tomb for Francis Hastings, 2nd Earl of Huntingdon, who died in 1561. On the east wall, a memorial to Theophilus Hastings, 9th Earl, who died in 1746, was designed by William Kent with sculpture by Michael Rysbrack. Having both Kent and Rysbrack on a single memorial in a parish church is the sort of thing that would draw crowds in London. Here it shares a building with the flower rota. The 9th Earl's widow, Selina Hastings, went on to found the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, a network of Calvinistic Methodist chapels. By her death in 1791 she had established 64 of them. She ran the whole operation from Ashby.
Between the castle and the town lie the Bath Grounds, a public park that has been here for over 200 years. The Gilwiskaw Brook — pronounced "jill-a-whiskey" — runs through the middle of it. The grounds were originally laid out for visitors to the Ivanhoe Baths, a neo-classical spa building designed by Robert Chaplin and built for £16,000, opening in 1822. The baths were named after Walter Scott's novel, published three years earlier, which had set a tournament scene at Ashby Castle. Scott knew the area from staying at Coleorton Hall nearby, and the book turned the town into an unlikely tourist destination overnight. The 1st Marquis of Hastings saw an opportunity. He built the baths, then the Royal Hotel in 1827 to accommodate the influx. But Ashby never quite made it as a spa town. Seaside resorts stole the fashion, visitor numbers dropped, and the baths closed in 1884. The building was demolished in 1962. The Royal Hotel still stands, Grade II listed, though it closed in 2018 and is being converted to townhouses. The Bath Grounds were acquired by the Town Council in August 2023. There's a cricket ground, a bowls club, and the kind of municipal quiet that makes you feel like the day has more hours in it than it probably does.
The name is Anglo-Danish at the front and Norman French at the back. "Ashby" means ash-tree farm. "De la Zouch" comes from a family of Breton descent called le Zouch — meaning "a stock" or "a tree stump" — who were granted the manor by the Earls of Leicester during the reign of Henry III. In the Domesday Book of 1086, the place was simply "Aschebie," held by Hugh de Grentmesnil. Twenty-one households were recorded, including a priest, which means there was a church here four centuries before there was a castle.
The town sits in the National Forest, a 200-square-mile project that has been planting trees across former coalfields and farmland since the early 1990s. Michael Heseltine planted the project's first tree at Willesley Wood, just southwest of town, in 1991. The results are visible in every direction now — young woodlands maturing into something real, former colliery sites turned into nature reserves with lakes, and new trails threading through the lot. Hicks Lodge, a couple of miles south, was a coal mine and is now a Forestry England cycling centre with traffic-free trails, a café, and bike hire. The National Forest Way, a 75-mile long-distance path, passes through Ashby; Stage 5 runs 7.5 miles to Ticknall through rolling fields and young woodland, passing directly through the Calke Abbey estate.
For a shorter walk, the five-mile circular that picks up the Ivanhoe Way is a good afternoon. The Ivanhoe Way is a 35-mile loop around north Leicestershire, created in 1994 and named after the novel. The five-mile route heads south from town through Smisby, past the Bluebell Arboretum — a nine-acre woodland garden specialising in rare trees, named not after the flowers but after a pub called the Bluebell in the next village, where the nursery started in 1979. The walking is gentle. This is not hill country. The land rolls rather than rises, and the views are long and agricultural, broken by the new stands of trees that the Forest is steadily filling in.
Calke Abbey is about four miles north — a National Trust property famous as "the un-stately home," left largely unrestored to show what happens when a country house goes into decline. The ancient deer park has thousand-year-old oaks. Moira Furnace, two and a half miles southwest, is a nineteenth-century blast furnace on the banks of the Ashby Canal — considered one of the best-preserved in Europe — now a museum and country park with narrowboat trips along the restored canal in summer.
Ashby lost its railway station in September 1964. The nearest mainline station is Burton upon Trent, about eight miles west. There's a campaign to reopen the Ivanhoe Line for passengers, which has been going since 2018 and proceeds at roughly the pace you'd expect. The A42 connects the town to the M1, and East Midlands Airport is nine miles northeast. Leicester is about thirty minutes by car, Derby and Nottingham about forty.
On Saturday afternoons, Brew fills up with people who've walked in from the trails, and the street food vendor sets up outside. Someone is usually playing guitar by five o'clock. The beer changes every week. The town doesn't.
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**Final word count: ~2,020 words.** Every fact verified across multiple sources. No banned phrases used. All pub names, historical attributions, building grades, menu items, and trail distances are sourced. The piece incorporates findings from all three research agents plus six rounds of targeted web searches.
