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The Butter Cross on Hallaton's village green is not a cross at all. It is a squat cone of coursed ironstone, three metres tall, topped with a stone ball, sitting on two circular steps. It looks like something between a bread oven and a small observatory. It dates from the seventeenth century, when Hallaton still had a weekly market and the structure kept butter and cheese cool for sale. The market is long gone. The cross remains, and once a year people climb on top of it and drink beer from small wooden barrels, which is more or less the story of the whole village.
Hallaton sits in the part of Leicestershire the county would rather you noticed — the rolling, empty, south-eastern corner where the land rises into what gets called High Leicestershire, though at no point does it feel especially high. It feels instead like the Cotswolds before anyone discovered the Cotswolds. The buildings are ironstone, the colour of dark honey. The hedgerows are thick. Red kites circle above fields that haven't changed use in centuries. The population is around six hundred. There are two pubs, a museum, a duck pond, a Grade I listed church, a motte and bailey castle, sixty-five listed buildings, and no shop. Market Harborough is eight miles south, and the nearest railway station is there too — East Midlands Railway, direct to London St Pancras in about an hour. You will need a car.
The Fox Inn sits at the north end of the village, next to the duck pond, which is genuinely a selling point. The picnic tables on the lawn look out over the water and whatever ducks and associated wildlife are present that afternoon, and for families with children this is approximately perfect. Inside it is a traditional pub, refurbished in 2011, with quarry tile floors, exposed ceiling beams, and a small snug off the public bar. The food is honest. Beer-battered fish and chips is £18.50. So is the homemade steak and ale pie with mash and gravy, which is the dish reviewers mention most. There is chicken tikka masala at £17.50, classic sausages and mash at the same, and a vegetarian burger made with a chickpea patty, avocado, and sweet chilli sauce for £16.50. Thursday is steak night. Sunday is a traditional roast. They run a two-for-£25 pie deal, which for a village with no other food retail is the kind of offer that anchors a community. The Fox is not trying to be a gastropub. It is trying to be a good pub, and the reviews suggest it is succeeding.
The Bewicke Arms is at the other end of the village on Eastgate, and it is a different proposition entirely. The building is Grade II listed, thatched, low-beamed, and somewhere between five and seven hundred years old depending on which source you trust. It closed for a long stretch, reopened in August 2023, and has since served Thai food under a husband-and-wife team who split their time between Leicestershire and Bangkok, and more recently Indian food. The menu has shifted more than once since reopening — pad Thai and chicken cashew nut curry gave way to samosas and curries — and the specifics depend on when you visit. What stays constant is Langton Brewery ale from nearby Market Harborough, a beer garden, a policy of welcoming dogs, and the fact that the building itself would justify a visit even if they served nothing at all. The adjacent Hallaton Tearoom, under the same ownership, does coffee and light lunches in a refurbished space with oak beams. The Bewicke also runs the Hare Pie Rooms, a three-bedroom B&B in a converted stable block with king-size beds and breakfast included. It is the only accommodation in the village.
Between the two pubs, behind the church, on a lane called Hogg Lane, is Hallaton Museum. It occupies a building known locally as the Tin Tab and has been open since 1978, founded by a woman named Honoria Whigham who wanted to record village life before it was forgotten. It is open weekends and bank holidays, roughly 2:30 to 5pm through the summer, and it won a Museums and Heritage Award in 2017 for a First World War exhibition produced on what the judges politely described as a limited budget. The permanent displays cover the Bottle Kicking and the Hallaton Treasure, of which more shortly. There is no admission charge, or at least there wasn't when it was last documented. The actual treasure — the important pieces — is at Harborough Museum in Market Harborough, but the village museum has a replica of the helmet and enough context to understand what was found here and why it matters.
St Michael and All Angels is the church you see from nearly every approach to the village. It sits on rising ground, which makes its thirteenth-century broach spire look even taller than it is. Pevsner called it "one of the most imposing of Leicestershire village churches," which from Pevsner is practically an outburst. The tower is three stages — ironstone at the base, limestone above — with paired lancet openings to the bell chamber and a corbel table. The spire has stumpy pinnacles at the angles and two tiers of lucarnes. Inside the north porch, built into the west wall, is a Norman tympanum showing St Michael killing a dragon, carved in low relief, surviving from the earlier church that stood here before the current one was built. The south arcade has quatrefoil piers. The north arcade has ballflower enrichment in its capitals, which is a fourteenth-century Decorated Gothic ornament that looks like a tiny stone flower caught mid-bloom. If you look at the west end of the north aisle wall, you can see the roofline of the Norman church pressed into the thirteenth-century stonework like a fossil.
The walking is exceptional, and not in the way that word is usually deployed. Three official parish walks start from the village: 3.75 miles, 4.5 miles, and 5.25 miles, all on gently undulating farmland with good stiles and tall yellow-topped waymarker posts. The Leicestershire Round, the Midshires Way, and the Macmillan Way all pass through or near the village, which gives you access to longer routes without having to drive to a trailhead. The 5.3-mile circular to Cranoe takes about two hours and gives views across the Welland Valley the whole way. A longer circuit of eleven miles reaches Cranoe, drops south on the Midshires Way to Medbourne — the rival village, the one they kick the bottles against — then pushes on to Nevill Holt and Blaston before looping back through Horninghold. The paths are across open farmland and through hedgerows, not along roads, and on a weekday you may not see another person between villages. This is not the Lake District. Nobody is selling you the experience. You just walk.
West of the village, visible from the Leicestershire Round, is Castle Hill — a motte and bailey earthwork that Historic England calls the finest in Leicestershire. The motte is seven and a half metres high, fifty metres across at the base, with a ditch up to three metres deep encircling it. A horseshoe-shaped bailey encloses an area of sixty by thirty metres. It was likely the administrative centre of Geoffrey Alselin's estate, built between 1066 and 1086. In 1877, railway engineers sank two shafts into the mound, found nothing of note, and left. Only earthworks survive. It is scheduled as an ancient monument and costs nothing to visit, because it is a hill in a field.
In November 2000, a metal detectorist named Ken Wallace found about 130 silver coins on a hilltop east of the village. The next day he found a silver ear. Over the following months, the Hallaton Fieldwork Group and the University of Leicester excavated the site and recovered more than five thousand Iron Age coins — more than doubling the total number of recorded Corieltauvian coins in existence — along with jewellery, ritual objects, and a Roman cavalry parade helmet made of iron, covered in silver sheet, and decorated with gold leaf. It had been buried as an offering at an open-air shrine, alongside a sacrificial dog. The helmet spent nine years in conservation at the British Museum. It is now at Harborough Museum in Market Harborough, and it is one of the most significant archaeological finds in Britain. The village where it was discovered has six hundred people and no shop.
The Domesday surveyors recorded Hallaton in 1086 with twenty-six households, two lord's plough teams, six men's plough teams, and woodland measuring four by two furlongs. They valued it at five pounds, up from three when Geoffrey Alselin acquired it. Henry III granted a weekly market in 1224. By 1284 there were two separate market grants and two yearly fairs. By 1831 the market had been abandoned entirely. This is the cycle of English villages — granted a market, lost a market, kept the Butter Cross.
On Easter Monday, Hallaton and Medbourne compete in the Hare Pie Scramble and Bottle Kicking, a tradition documented since the late eighteenth century but believed to be considerably older. The sequence: a hare pie is blessed by the vicar, cut apart, and thrown to the crowd. Three small wooden barrels — called bottles, though they are not bottles — are then contested between teams from each village. Two are filled with beer. The third is solid wood, painted red and white. The objective is to get the barrel across a boundary stream roughly a mile away. There are virtually no rules. No eye-gouging, no strangling, no weapons. Everything else is permitted. The contest crosses ditches, hedgerows, and barbed wire. Broken bones are not uncommon. The winners climb the Butter Cross and drink from the barrel. The losers get the solid one.
The Bewicke family owned Hallaton Hall from 1713 and gave their name to the pub. One of the more remarkable Bewickes was Alicia, born in 1845, who married Archibald Little, moved to Chongqing, and in 1898 founded the Natural Foot Society to campaign against foot-binding in China. She published a six-hundred-page book called *Intimate China* illustrated with over a hundred of her own photographs. She has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The hall is still there, on the edge of the village. The pub named after her family serves curry.
There is no bus service worth relying on — a Royal Mail mobile post office visits on Wednesdays and Fridays for one hour, which tells you roughly how connected Hallaton is to the twenty-first century. But on a Tuesday afternoon in late spring, when the ironstone is warm and the spire throws a long shadow across the green and the ducks are doing whatever ducks do on the pond outside The Fox, it does not feel like isolation. It feels like the rest of the county simply hasn't arrived yet.
