The base and shaft of a market cross stand on the green where Front Street meets the main road in Billesdon. The market itself hasn't been held since the late 18th century, but the cross is still there, marking the spot where a weekly Friday market once ran under a charter granted in 1618. Two fairs a year, a weekly market, and now a stone stump. These things happen to villages.
Billesdon sits nine miles east of Leicester, just off the A47, in the rolling uplands of East Leicestershire. The countryside here gets up to 700 feet in places, which is high for this part of the world. The village is larger than you might expect — it has a doctor's surgery, a fire station, a village shop, and the Coplow Centre, which serves as a community leisure facility. For a while, this was a proper market town. It still carries itself like one.
The Queens Head is the pub you want. It's Grade II listed, partly thatched at the rear, and has been selling drinks for over 200 years. Gill does most of the cooking, Mark serves behind the bar, and the food is home-cooked in the genuine sense — Sunday lunches, meals at fair prices, no nonsense. There's a beer garden with picnic tables at the side and rear, a play area, and a petanque pitch, which is not something you find at every village pub. Two regular beers and two changing ones on the taps.
The New Greyhound Inn is the other pub, housed in a building dated 1801 by a gable-end stone. Before that, the old Greyhound operated from a three-storey building on the opposite side of the Market Place until it lost its licence in 1916.
The walking here is the main draw. Billesdon Coplow is a wooded knoll at 625 feet, one of the most visible landmarks in East Leicestershire — you can see it from twenty miles to the south. The hill sits on ancient trackways and pulls walking routes towards it like a hub. The Coplow house is private, but the hill and its approaches are open. Beyond that, there's a circular route through Frisby, a longer linear walk of eleven and a half miles through High Leicestershire via Tilton on the Hill and Burrough on the Hill, and a loop past Sludge Hall and Cold Newton Grange. The Billesdon Local History Group has produced a trail guide, available for download.
St John the Baptist dates from before 1162, when it was given to Leicester Abbey. The tower base and north arcade went up before 1250. The limestone ashlar tower was rebuilt in 1862 with a broach spire above a corbel table, and the whole building is a patchwork of ironstone and limestone that records about eight centuries of people adding bits on.
The Domesday surveyors recorded 25 people, 12 carucates of land, and a value of 60 shillings. Worked flints and Roman coins have turned up here, along with an Anglo-Saxon gilded copper-alloy brooch from the mid-sixth century. People have been finding reasons to stop at this spot for a long time.
By 1851 the population had reached 1,085. It dropped to 543 by 1931, then climbed back to 901 by 2011. The market cross still stands on the green, counting none of them.
