Harby

The Last Pub Standing

The Nags Head has a possible priest hole. Nobody seems entirely sure where it is, which is probably how priest holes are supposed to work. The pub itself is Grade II listed, timber-framed at its core, with coursed ironstone additions layered on over the centuries — fifteenth century originally, extended in the 1600s, again in 1722, touched up in the twentieth century. It looks like a building that has never quite finished deciding what it wants to be. Four chefs have worked the kitchen together for over six years, which in pub terms is practically a marriage. The menu leans seasonal, locally sourced, with an extensive burger list and a standing offer on Tuesdays: one main course for £6.50, two for twelve pounds, the theme changing weekly. On Fridays, something called Jeff's Love Shack opens up and starts turning out freshly made pizzas and kebabs, eat in or takeaway. The Sunday lunches get particular praise. There's a spacious beer garden and they take dogs.

It is, for the record, the last pub standing. Harby once had three. The Marquis of Granby closed sometime between 1871 and 1881. The White Hart held on longer but was demolished in 2010. The Nags Head, possibly the oldest pub in Leicestershire, outlasted them both.

Vale and Walking Country

Harby sits in the Vale of Belvoir, nine miles north of Melton Mowbray. The landscape is flat, fertile, and agricultural, with the ridge of Belvoir rising to the north and east. The buildings are ironstone — that warm, ochre-brown local stone that makes even a shed look like it has opinions about planning permission. Bus 24 connects the village to Melton Mowbray and Bottesford. There was a railway station from 1879 to 1962, but that's gone now.

The Harby Round is a 3.4-mile loop that takes about an hour and twenty minutes, rated easy, passing near St Mary the Virgin church on the way. Beyond that, the Vale of Belvoir opens up into proper walking country. Belvoir Castle is about 4.9 miles from Harby in a straight line, with a longer journey by road or on foot. The county council publishes a walks leaflet if you want a route drawn out for you.

Church and Early Harby

St Mary the Virgin was built around 1475 and is open daily. It has five bells, the oldest cast in 1610, and a Thomas Elliot pipe organ from 1874 that carries its own Grade II Historic certification. The font dates to the Decorated period, which puts it somewhere in the thirteenth or fourteenth century — older than the building it sits in.

The village name is Old Scandinavian. Danish settlers arrived around 850 AD and called the place something meaning "village of the herdsmen" — *hiorth* for herd, *by* for settlement. By 1086, Robert de Tosny held seventeen carucates here. The Domesday surveyors recorded eight slaves and valued the annual output at five pounds.

Poetry and the Canal

George Crabbe, the poet, served as chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle in the 1780s. His poem "The Village," published in 1783, drew on what he saw in and around Harby. It's considered one of the founding works of literary realism in English poetry. He came to write about rural life as it actually was, not as pastoral convention said it should be. The Vale of Belvoir gave him the material.

The Grantham Canal once had a wharf near the village, shipping grain out to the wider network. The canal corridor still crosses the surrounding landscape, though the barges are long gone.

Memorial and School

The war memorial went up in 1920. It names nineteen soldiers from the First World War and two from the Second. The village school, established around 1827, was ranked in the top one percent nationally for attainment in 2017. For a settlement founded by Danish herdsmen, that's not bad going.