Burrough on the Hill

The Pub and the Village

The Stag & Hounds grows its own vegetables in raised beds outside the front door. The hogget on the menu was raised on Burrough Hill, which you can see from the beer garden. The game birds were shot locally. The menu changes weekly, and at lunchtime you can eat two courses for £20 or three for £23. Chef-owner Dom Clarke brought a Michelin Bib Gourmand with him from Lancashire — and then earned another one here, making the Stag & Hounds Leicestershire's only Bib Gourmand venue at the time of listing. It also made the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs in 2022 and 2023.

The pub is, effectively, Burrough on the Hill. There are no shops. The village is a small collection of houses on minor roads off the B6047, about seven miles from Melton Mowbray. The nearest train station is Melton; local bus services exist but shouldn't be relied upon for anything urgent.

A Historic Inn, Then the Hill

The building itself dates to the 16th century and has traded under various names. It was Grant's Free House for a while. Clarke reopened it in late 2019 as the Stag & Hounds, reviving the pub's original name, which nods to the area's hunting heritage. Dogs, walkers, and cyclists are all welcome.

But nobody comes to Burrough on the Hill just for the pub. They come for the hill.

Iron Age Heights and the Six-Mile Circuit

Burrough Hill sits at roughly 210 metres above sea level — the highest point in the area — and on top of it is a 12-acre Iron Age hillfort, the finest univallate example in Leicestershire. The ramparts still stand three metres above the interior. People have been up here since the Mesolithic period, but the busiest years were 100 BC to AD 50, when the settlement had cobbled roads, a stone guard-house, a complete roundhouse, and trade links wide enough to bring in a horned bronze shield. The University of Leicester ran a five-year dig from 2010 and turned up loom weights, an Iron Age razor, spearheads, and knives. The whole site is now an 86-acre country park. Free access. You just walk up.

The best circular walk starts at the Burrough Hill car park — pay and display — and covers six miles. You climb to the hillfort ramparts, descend via the Leicestershire Round to Somerby, and loop back through farmland. The views stretch across the Wreake Valley. The fields below still carry medieval ridge-and-furrow patterns. Brown hares and skylarks are common. Allow two and a half to three and a half hours.

Church Effigies and Wartime Memory

St Mary the Virgin is 13th-century, Grade II listed, with a western tower and spire holding four bells, the oldest cast in 1600. In the south aisle there's a stone effigy of a man in armour, his feet resting on a lion — thought to be William Stockton, who died in 1470. His wife Margaret's effigy is in the north aisle, though less of it survives.

The village has a quiet habit of brushing up against large events. The 10th Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, was billeted here before Operation Market Garden — the Arnhem operation — in September 1944. A memorial garden near Burrough Court, about 0.8 miles from the village in a straight line, marks the connection. The celebrated racehorse Burrough Hill Lad, who won the 1984 Cheltenham Gold Cup, was named after this place by his owner Stan Riley. And the 18th-century surgeon William Cheselden, one of the great anatomists of his age, was born here.

The Parish That Joined Somerby

The parish was absorbed into Somerby in 1936. The hill, naturally, stayed where it was.