The Old Black Horse Inn has a pétanque pitch in its beer garden, which tells you something about the kind of village Houghton on the Hill is trying to be, or possibly already is. The pub sits on Main Street, an Everards tied house with log fires in winter and a garden that looks out over open farmland. Sunday roasts come with at least three choices each week — beef, lamb, free-range chicken, fish, and vegetarian options — and there's a separate lunch menu of sandwiches, jacket potatoes, and light bites. The jacket potatoes operate under the name "Potato Bill's," Wednesday to Saturday. Dogs are welcome in the bar and snug.
Walk east along Uppingham Road and you reach the Rose & Crown, which is a different proposition entirely. The bar has sports on the televisions. The restaurant, in a side conservatory, serves Indo-Chinese and Indian food — lamb tawa, Manchurian prawns, butter chicken, crispy chilli mushrooms, chilli mogo, bullet naans with cheese. The kitchen will prepare off-menu dishes if they have the ingredients, which is a level of flexibility you don't often find. The restaurant runs separately from the pub, so you pay for food and drinks at different points. The building has been a coaching inn since at least 1810.
Two pubs with genuinely different menus is good going for a village this size.
There are no specialist food shops. Leicester is six miles west for proper shopping, Market Harborough twelve miles south-east. The 747 bus runs to both Leicester and Uppingham, though most people drive.
Houghton sits on a ridge, and the name says so — Old English *hoh* (a spur of land) plus *tun* (settlement). The elevation earns its keep. Views run across the Harborough district and east Leicestershire, and the surrounding footpaths take you through open farmland to Ingarsby, a deserted medieval village reachable on foot. The route passes the site of the old Ingarsby for Houghton on the Hill railway station, which closed in 1954.
St Catharine's Church has a stone inscribed with the Roman numeral MXIV — 1014 — set into the east wall. The earliest verifiable fabric dates to the mid-thirteenth century, with carved heads said to represent Henry III and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Iron Age pottery has been found near the church, and worked flint flakes from around 3000 BC turned up near the school. People have been finding reasons to stand on this hilltop for a long time.
The Domesday surveyors recorded it as Hohtone in 1086, population ten.
John Glover was born here in 1767. He became known as "the English Claude" for his landscape paintings, then emigrated to Tasmania at sixty-three and is now regarded as the father of Australian landscape painting. His work hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The village doesn't make much of this.
Mains electricity arrived in 1932, which was remarkably late for somewhere six miles from a city. Mains water had only come in 1904. Leicester was right there the whole time.
The Black Horse's beer garden has a children's play area, a tuck shop, and those views across the fields. On a summer evening, with an Everards ale and someone else's children shrieking at a reasonable distance, you can see why people stayed on this hill.
