The Cheney Arms is a three-storey Georgian house dated 1740, which is unusual for a pub because it wasn't built as one. It started life as a dower house for the Cheney family and became a pub at some later point that nobody seems to have written down. It is the only pub in the UK with this name. The bar wraps around a central servery on three sides, there's a real fire, and on Wednesday nights they play petanque.
It's an Everards house — Beacon Hill, Tiger, Old Original — plus two changing beers. Food runs Wednesday to Saturday lunchtimes and evenings, Sundays until four, nothing Monday or Tuesday. The kitchen does homemade pies, steaks, and fresh seafood, all locally sourced. Dogs are welcome in the public bar but not the dining room. There are four en-suite bedrooms upstairs if you'd rather not drive home.
This is the sole pub in a village of about 450 people that has no shop, no post office, and no retail of any kind. The village shop closed in 1995 after forty-four years. A mobile fish and chip van visits weekly. The nearest supermarket is a Morrisons Daily in East Goscote, four miles away. You will need a car. The village lost its regular bus service in December 2019 and now relies on a bookable minibus. The nearest railway stations are Melton Mowbray and Syston, both around six miles off.
What Gaddesby does have is a church that justifies the trip on its own. St Luke's is Grade I listed. Pevsner called it one of the largest and most beautiful village churches in Leicestershire, which from Pevsner counts as enthusiasm. The nave dates from the early twelfth century, the tower and broach spire from the mid-thirteenth, and the south aisle exterior has fourteenth-century Decorated stonework — ornate buttresses, pinnacles, carved detail — paid for by the East Leicestershire wool trade. Inside are sixteen oak bench pews from the same period with carved poppy-head ends, among the earliest surviving in England.
Then there is the monument. A life-sized marble sculpture by Joseph Gott of Colonel Cheney of the Scots Greys, dying on one of four horses killed under him at Waterloo. The horse is collapsing. Cheney is preparing to spring off. A carved relief beneath shows him leading the charge. It was originally in the conservatory of Gaddesby Hall and was moved to the church chancel on rollers in 1917 when the Hall was sold. It is an extraordinary thing to find in a village with no shop.
The walking is good. The village sits in High Leicestershire — rolling country between 250 and 350 feet, with long views from the ridges, cornfields, hedgerows, and medieval ridge and furrow still visible in the pasture. The Leicestershire Round passes through. A circular walk via Barsby and Ashby Folville links three parishes within the same civil parish. A longer loop to East Goscote covers twelve kilometres with enough elevation to feel like you've done something.
Henry III granted the manor to the Knights Templar in 1231. After the order's suppression in 1312, it passed to the Knights Hospitallers until the dissolution. The Domesday surveyors recorded it as Gadesbi — the "-by" suffix is Old Norse for farm, a remnant of Danish settlement. On Chapel Lane there is a stone where John Wesley reputedly preached, though reputedly is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Skylarks and yellowhammers sing over the fields. Church spires built on wool money are visible across the wolds. The Cheney Arms lights its fire.
