Donisthorpe

The names that came back

The Rawdon Arms recently got its old name back. For years it was called something else, but the pub reverted to the name of the colliery that built this village and then, in 1990, left it. The mine closed. The name came back. These things take time in Donisthorpe.

Two pubs remain on a street that once had five. The Rawdon Arms is a single L-shaped room with comfortable seating and the feel of a place where people know each other's drink orders. The Halfway House, further along Church Street, used to be the Woodman. It's family and dog-friendly, serves food, and sits roughly in the centre of things — which, given the name, seems about right.

The arithmetic of closure

At the colliery's peak, Donisthorpe had fourteen shops, two post offices, and five pubs. By 1991 that was four shops and a post office. Today there is one shop, opened in 2014. The arithmetic of a mining village after the mine.

The colliery closed on 12 April 1990. On that day, a recording crew turned up to document the last working steam winding engine in the Midlands — a horizontal twin-cylinder machine with 28-inch cylinders, dating to somewhere around 1880. At closure, Donisthorpe was one of only two pits in Britain still winding coal by steam. Six years later, Leicestershire County Council buried the colliery lagoons under clay and planted 74,000 trees on top.

From pit to paths

That planting is now Donisthorpe Woodland Park, 36 hectares of oak, ash, poplar and Corsican pine growing where men once dug 863 feet down. Three kilometres of stone-surfaced paths run through it, flat and accessible, with interpretation boards explaining what used to be underfoot. From the park you can pick up the Ashby Woulds Heritage Trail, a six-kilometre walk along the restored Ashby Canal towpath to Moira Furnace. The Heart of the Forest trail connects into the wider National Forest network beyond that.

The village sits three miles south-west of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, within the National Forest. The M42 is two and a half miles south at junction 11. Diamond Buses run from Ashby Market Street to Donisthorpe every four hours, Monday to Saturday, which requires a certain commitment to planning. The railway station closed to passengers in 1934.

A church remade, a village remembered

St John the Evangelist was built in 1838 for £6,000, most of it put up by three sisters named Moore. It's Grade II listed, with a tower and pinnacles. In August 2024 it reopened after refurbishment as "Village Heart at St John's" — part church, part bookable community venue. The Miners' Welfare Centre had already gone the same way in 2005, converted to a children's fun centre.

The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Durandestorp — the outlying settlement associated with someone called Durand. In 1951, Donisthorpe Colliery won Britain's Best Pit, output running at 750,000 tons a year. By the mid-1960s it was over a million. By 1990 it was nothing at all.

What the trees conceal

Walk through the woodland park on a weekday afternoon and you'll pass dog walkers, the odd runner, a parent with a pushchair on the stone paths. The trees are thirty years old now, tall enough to close over the trail in places. You wouldn't know what was underneath unless you stopped to read the boards.