Kibworth

Shops, landscape and The Swan

Kibworth Books, on the High Street in Kibworth Beauchamp, won Independent Bookseller of the Year for the region in 2012, three years after opening. The High Street also has a Co-op and a post office. A Farley Country Attire, which has been selling country clothing since 1968, has its Kibworth shop at 77 Harborough Road. For a pair of villages with a combined population that's never been enormous, the shopping holds up.

Kibworth is actually two villages — Beauchamp and Harcourt — pressed close enough together that the join is hard to spot. The A6 runs through Harcourt. Rolling arable farmland surrounds both, and the Grand Union Canal marks the southern edge of the parish. Foxton Locks is about three miles south-south-east, which gives you one of the better canal walks in Leicestershire without having to try very hard.

The Swan on the High Street has quarry tile floors, exposed beams, a log fire, and a central servery between two snug bars. There's a partially covered courtyard at the back and picnic tables at the front. They do Sunday roasts and have one regular real ale plus a changing guest. Dogs welcome.

Kibworth's historic pubs

The Coach and Horses in Harcourt is the one to know about for food. It's an eighteenth-century coaching inn, Grade II listed, with an original inglenook and low beamed ceilings. The menu runs from rump steak ciabatta to chicken tikka to fish pie, and the burgers have accumulated the kind of reviews that make you suspicious until you try one. It was a brewpub in the nineteenth century and sits on the old 1726 turnpike road, with a fine pub sign in relief across the frontage.

The Railway Arms on Station Street was built in 1845, before the Midland Railway line actually arrived. The station it was named for closed in 1968. It has a large walled garden and well-kept real ales.

Walks and a documented past

For walks, there's a flat two-mile route to Smeeton Westerby, a four-mile loop taking in the Grand Union Canal, and a circular to Foxton Locks via Saddington Reservoir. The old Roman Gartree Road passes through the parish if you want something with a longer pedigree.

Merton College, Oxford, has owned this parish since 1270, when Walter de Merton bought it from Saer de Harcourt. That means 750 years of continuous records — court rolls, rent books, maps, a letter from the village butcher dated 1447. Michael Wood used the archive for his BBC documentary *Story of England* in 2010, telling the whole of English history through Kibworth alone. Residents dug test pits in their gardens and turned up Roman samian ware and prehistoric flint.

Loss and survival

The Black Death reached Kibworth at the start of 1349. The Merton College court rolls record the first deaths on 29 April. Around two-thirds of the population died — roughly 500 people across Beauchamp, Harcourt, and Smeeton Westerby. The heaviest known losses of any English village.

St Wilfrid's has been standing in some form for over 800 years. The tower and spire collapsed in 1825; the replacement tower, built during the reign of William IV, came back without the spire.

Connections and dissent

There's no railway station anymore, but Market Harborough is six miles south and gets you to London St Pancras in about an hour. The Arriva X3 runs roughly hourly between Leicester and Market Harborough, and there's a FoxConnect on-demand service if the timetable doesn't suit.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, the poet and pioneer of children's literature, was born at "The Old House" in Harcourt in 1743. Her father ran the Dissenting Academy, which at one point rivalled Oxford and Cambridge — teaching Hebrew, Greek, philosophy, and trigonometry from a village in south Leicestershire.