The Bradgate Arms has been serving drinks for over four hundred years, which makes it older than the reservoir, the bus route, and most of the houses around it. For a full century — 1888 to 1988 — it was run by the Jackson family, before being sold to Hoskins Brewery and then on to Banks's of Wolverhampton. The old beams are still there. So are the quiz nights and the long-alley skittles.
The menu runs to loaded nachos with mature Cheddar, guacamole and jalapeños, double beef-patty burgers, crispy battered chicken burgers, and loaded potato skins with bacon and sour cream. Children eat from their own menu, Monday to Saturday, noon to nine. It is, as reviewers like to point out, about ten minutes on foot from Bradgate Park.
Cropston's second pub, The Badger's Sett, used to be called The Reservoir Inn, which was more geographically honest but perhaps less marketable. It's a Vintage Inns place now, part of the Mitchells & Butlers group. The slow-cooked pork belly gets mentioned often. Sunday brings a Trio roast — beef, pork belly and turkey on the same plate. Dogs are welcome.
Two pubs for a village of twelve hundred people is a reasonable ratio.
The walk most people come for starts at the car park on Roecliffe Road and follows the western edge of Cropston Reservoir — fifty-two acres of water built in the 1860s to supply Leicester after successive cholera epidemics. Footpaths run from the car park to the boat house and then all the way round, with a section cutting through Bradgate Country Park. Red and fallow deer graze close enough to the waterside path that you don't need binoculars, though binoculars help.
From there you can extend into Bradgate Park proper — 830 acres of parkland and ancient woodland, with the ruins of the sixteenth-century Bradgate House visible on the hillside. Keep going and you reach Beacon Hill, the second-highest point in Leicestershire. The whole area sits on the edge of Charnwood Forest, which is pre-Cambrian rock, meaning the geology here is genuinely ancient rather than just old.
The village itself is small and quiet. A garage near the crossroads of Reservoir Road and Station Road covers the basics. A few sixteenth-century cottages survive among the later houses. Cropston never had its own parish church — it has always belonged to Thurcaston — though a Nonconformist chapel went up in 1879.
The name first appears as "Cropeston" in the Leicestershire Survey of 1130. The Domesday surveyors didn't record it at all. By the 1740s there were about twenty-six houses here, mostly farmworkers and framework knitters. The reservoir construction in the late 1860s swallowed the Head Keeper's house and a good stretch of farmland. Then in 1899 the Great Central Railway opened Rothley station nearby, and professionals from Leicester started building country houses. The population went from 191 in 1901 to 909 by 1931.
Bus services still run into Leicester. By car it's a straightforward drive via the B5330.
On a weekday afternoon, the reservoir path is mostly dog walkers and retired couples with flask tea. The deer watch them pass without much concern.
