The Bell Inn has been open since 1759, closed once, and was bought by the village. That last part is the important bit. When the pub shut, residents raised the money to purchase it themselves, making it the first community-owned pub in Melton Borough. It reopened on 28 April 2022. There are three rooms with wooden beams, an enclosed stove, and a conservatory that opens onto an outdoor seating area. Dogs are welcome and get a bowl of water and a spot by the fire.
The food is good. Fish and chips with crispy batter, scampi, tapas — the Sunday roasts have a local reputation that seems to be earned rather than inherited. Everything is locally sourced where possible, and CAMRA lists the pub, which keeps one regular real ale on and two changing guest ales from local breweries.
It is, at present, the only pub. There are no shops.
This matters less than it might, because Melton Mowbray is three and a half miles east and has everything you'd need. Buses 5A and 8 stop near the village. The nearest railway station is at Melton.
Frisby sits on the River Wreake in a valley that does very little dramatically and does it well — water meadows, a meandering river, ironstone villages spaced along its course. The buildings here are ironstone too, that warm brown-orange that looks different every hour depending on the light.
The walking is the main draw beyond the pub. The Leicestershire Round long-distance path passes through, and a dedicated Villages of the Wreake route follows the river through Asfordby, Frisby, Brooksby, Thrussington, and Ratcliffe on the Wreake. You can pick up a parish walks leaflet from the county council. The riverside footpaths northwest of the village pass old mill channels — cuts dug to divert the Wreake to Frisby Mill, which was working at the time of Domesday and rebuilt several times before falling quiet at the start of the twentieth century. The channels are still visible in the fields if you know to look for them.
The church is St Thomas of Canterbury, which is an unusual dedication for a rural Midlands parish — Thomas Becket's cult was widespread but his name stuck more often to urban churches. The oldest parts are twelfth century. Norman round-headed windows survive in the lower west tower stage, and much of the rest is fourteenth and fifteenth century work, built from the same ironstone rubble as the village around it.
The name Frisby is Old Danish — a settlement of the Frisians, planted here by Danish settlers in the ninth or tenth century. The Wreake itself comes from a Danish word meaning twisting or meandering, which is accurate. In 1086 the Domesday surveyors recorded it as Frisebie: roughly ten households, forty acres of meadow, six mills valued at two pounds twelve shillings and twopence. Part of the entry is marked as waste, suggesting the Conquest had not been kind to it.
The village had a second moment of fame in the eighteenth century, when the parish priest — a man named William Brecknock Wragg — agreed to marry couples who had travelled some distance, at a time when the church and state kept tight control over who could wed and where. Frisby became known as the Gretna Green of the Midlands.
These days the village is quieter than that. But the pub is open, the river is still meandering, and if you walk the fields to the northwest in the right light you can trace where the mill channels ran nine hundred years ago.
