The Red Lion on Kegworth's High Street once kept a lion in its beer garden. A circus passing through the village left the animal behind — caged, presumably — and for a period in the 1930s the pub's name was more literal than anyone had planned. The lion is gone. The beer garden remains, and so do the real ales. CAMRA's Loughborough branch lists it as a Georgian pub of historic interest, which is one way of putting it.
Kegworth sits in the Soar Valley, six miles north of Loughborough, where the old London-to-Manchester coaching road used to run straight up the High Street and down Packington Hill. That road became the A6. The Georgian buildings along it are the evidence — stone-fronted, flat-faced, built for a village that was on the way to somewhere. The M1 is at Junction 24, and East Midlands Parkway station is about three miles out on the Midland Main Line to St Pancras.
The High Street still functions. Soar Trading Co on the Market Place sells provisions and stocks a leaflet for the village's Pubs Past and Present Heritage Walk, a two-mile circuit that takes in the sites of former and surviving pubs. In 1901, Kegworth had a population of roughly 2,100 and fourteen pubs. It also had three breweries. The last of these, Wells Brewery, was bought by Worthington & Co of Burton in 1924, and that was the end of brewing here. The brewery site is now a modern office block.
The walk leaflet was written to accompany guided tours led by Sheila Sharpe, a volunteer at Kegworth Museum. The museum is fully accredited and staffed entirely by volunteers. It sells a book on the history of Kegworth pubs by Bill Wells, with proceeds going to the Patients Comfort Fund at Leicester Royal Infirmary.
For actual walking — the kind with mud — the ten-mile Kegworth Circular starts from the car park by the canal locks on the eastern edge of the village. It follows the canalised River Soar, picks up the Midshires Way to West Leake, loops through Sutton Bonington, and comes back along the riverside. Shorter options include the Shallow Lock Loop from St Andrew's Church downstream and back, or the Hungary Lane circuit through open farmland to the west.
St Andrew's is Grade II* listed. The tower base dates to about 1250. The rest went up around 1370, when the parish's two manors were unified under one rector, and the whole thing is Decorated style in local stone with an octagonal spire. Earl Harold — the one who died at Hastings — held the manor at the time of the Domesday survey, when the place was recorded as Cachworde. The name means 'enclosure of Kaggi,' from Old English and Old Danish, which tells you something about Kaggi's ambitions for the site.
Framework knitting and lace were the main industries by the mid-nineteenth century. The village supplied hosiery to Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales.
On 8 January 1989, British Midland Flight 92 crashed on the M1 embankment near the airport, killing 47 people. A memorial bench stands in the village cemetery. The disaster changed cockpit procedures across the aviation industry.
Kegworth has produced, or claims some connection to, the cartoonist Bill Tidy, the biologist Keith Campbell — who helped clone Dolly the sheep — and the Olympic swimmer Adam Peaty. The Red Lion, for its part, has not kept any further exotic animals.
