The Dew Drop Inn has no kitchen. This is not a failing — it's a policy. Thursday to Saturday, food traders set up between five and nine, bringing whatever they've brought, and the rest of the week the pub concentrates on what it does have: Wye Valley HPA, Draught Bass, a couple of changing cask ales, real fires, and three rooms that CAMRA considers of special national historic interest. The interior is largely unaltered. The glazed white brick walls in the restrooms look like they belong in a Victorian swimming bath. The lounge is small and well-upholstered in a way that suggests nobody has been allowed to reupholster it.
Monday is game night. Wednesday is open mic. Thursday is quiz night, alternating weeks, so you'll need to check. Sunday afternoons there's live music from half three. Happy hour runs Monday to Thursday, three till five, twenty per cent off draught. Beer festivals at Easter and August bank holiday. For a pub with no kitchen, it keeps itself busy.
The Anchor Inn, a few doors up on Loughborough Road, is a different proposition. It's an 18th-century coaching inn, Grade II listed, built to serve traffic on the old A6 between London and Manchester. Everards run it now. The kitchen does fish and chips, Sunday roasts, gluten-free and vegetarian options, food served noon to nine. The beer garden has a pétanque piste, which gets use in summer.
Both pubs sit on Loughborough Road because Loughborough Road is, functionally, Hathern. The A6 runs straight through, and the village arranged itself along it. This was the main coaching route north for over a century. Now it's a busy trunk road with regular traffic, which is less romantic but means the bus to Loughborough or Leicester stops outside.
The church of St Peter and St Paul stands in the village centre, built mainly in the fourteenth century from Charnwood stone, though parts of the fabric go back to Saxon and Norman times. The font may be Saxon — one of the oldest in the county. The tower has a peal of eight bells. Near the church, a fourteenth-century preaching cross sits on a graduated base of five steps. It's been standing there for roughly seven hundred years, which is longer than most things manage.
Hathern appears in the Domesday Book as Avederne, Old English for hawthorn. The hedgerows evidently made an impression on the surveyors.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the village had moved on to framework knitting and farming, like much of this part of Leicestershire. John Heathcoat operated a textile mill here and in 1808–9 invented the bobbin-net machine, which could weave a hexagonal lace-like net. He later moved his operations to Tiverton after Luddites attacked his Loughborough mill. The hawthorn hedgerows presumably stayed.
Walk east from the village and within a mile you reach the River Soar and Dishley Pool. The paths are flat and quiet. The village is surrounded by open fields separating it from Loughborough and Shepshed, and locals have campaigned to keep it that way. Loughborough station is about two miles south, on the Midland Main Line, for when the fields aren't enough.
The green gap has held so far. Hathern is a commuter village that would rather you didn't call it a suburb.
