The Cross Keys on Bondgate still has its original etched glass windows and Minton tiling, which tells you something about Castle Donington before you've walked ten yards. This is a village that kept things. The pub extended over the years by absorbing the house next door, and now serves hand-raised pork pies and pulls Wye Valley HPA and Marston's Pedigree alongside rotating guests. There's a real fire. Quiz night is every other Wednesday.
Walk up to the Nag's Head and the menu takes a turn nobody expects. Steak Diane sits alongside Lebanese chicken flatbreads, a mezze sharing platter with hummus, shawarma and falafel, and — further down — boerewors sausage and bobotie. The South African and Lebanese influence is genuine, not decorative. The stuffed loin of lamb comes on cinnamon green beans with vegetable couscous and tzatziki. The steamed barramundi arrives with creamed leeks and smoked bacon. The interior is described by regulars as beautifully furnished with eclectic furniture, which in practice means no two chairs match and it works.
Castle Donington sits on high ground in North West Leicestershire, looking north over the Trent valley. The National Forest begins to the southwest. Donington Park lies to the south, which means the village shares its postcode with both a motor racing circuit and the Download Festival, one of the largest heavy rock festivals in the country. The 1993 European Grand Prix was held here — Ayrton Senna's drive that day is still talked about as one of the finest in Formula 1 history.
The castle itself is mostly gone. It went up in the 1150s, built by the de Lacy family, and what remains is a mound you can trace in the street pattern: The Barroon and Big Hill curve around where the fortifications stood. You have to know what you're looking at, but once you do, the shape of the village makes sense.
St Edward King and Martyr dates from around 1200 and has been added to in every century since — aisles widened in the fourteenth, a spire put on in the late fourteenth, clerestory in the fifteenth. The alabaster tomb of Robert and Eleanor Haslyryg, from 1520, lies in the north aisle. Medieval stained glass survives.
The 2.5-mile circular walk starts from the village's northern edge, passes the castle mound and heads east toward Hemington and Daleacre Hill. You pass Lockington Hall, a seventeenth-century Grade II listed house, and the ruins of a chapel that hasn't been used since the 1500s. It's a gentle loop through countryside that connects several villages before returning along Church Lane.
For longer walks, the Trent and Mersey Canal towpath at Shardlow is to the north, and Staunton Harold Reservoir lies to the southwest.
East Midlands Airport is immediately adjacent — the closest UK airport to any village of this size, which is either convenient or not, depending on your feelings about flight paths. The M1 at junction 23A and the A453 connect you to everywhere else. East Midlands Parkway station is about five miles away.
Donington Hall, the old country house on the park estate, is now the headquarters of Norton Motorcycles. Lace-making workshops once filled the village through the 1800s; some of the buildings survive, though the industry collapsed in the 1850s. The Wakes Fair, granted by Edward I in 1278, still runs for three days every October in Borough Street — one of the oldest continuous fairs in Leicestershire.
The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Dunintune. It had roughly fifty-eight households and twelve ploughlands. The name means the farmstead of a man called Dunna, who has been dead for about a thousand years but still gets the credit.
