Kirby Muxloe

First Impressions and the Unfinished Castle

The Castle Hotel serves breakfast from seven in the morning, which tells you something about Kirby Muxloe's sense of itself. This is a village with a ruined castle, two proper pubs, a greengrocers with a florist attached, and a bakery. It sits five miles west of Leicester, just off the M1, and behaves as though the city isn't there.

The castle is the thing you notice first. Or rather, the moat is — a wide rectangle of water with a brick gatehouse rising out of it, unfinished and roofless, surrounded by flat ground and not much else. William, Lord Hastings started building it in 1480. Three years later Richard III had him executed and the builders went home. His widow carried on for a bit, then didn't. English Heritage look after it now. Grade I listed. You can walk to it from the village centre in a few minutes.

Two Pubs on Main Street

The Castle Hotel sits on Main Street overlooking that moat. It's a 17th-century farmhouse, Grade II listed, older than its pub licence by a couple of centuries. Greene King run it under their Chef & Brewer brand, which means hand-battered cod and chips, steak and ale pie, gourmet burgers, and a Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding and what they describe as unlimited gravy. There are hotel rooms if you want to stay.

The Royal Oak, further along Main Street, is the more interesting pub. It's an independent freehouse, first licensed in 1810, and it's had lives. Everards bought it in 1901. Someone rebuilt it in the 1970s and called it the Spanish Blade. It became the Royal Oak again in 1981. The food now is seasonal and locally sourced, with a deli counter selling cheese, charcuterie, olives, and fresh bread. Monday and Tuesday are Pie Night. Wednesday is Burger Night. Thursday, presumably, you rest. They do a champagne breakfast on weekends from ten, and an early bird menu — two courses from £12.95 — which is reasonable for what the reviews suggest is genuinely good cooking.

Shops, School and Church

The village has more shops than you'd expect: chemist, bakery, supermarket, hairdressers, opticians, greengrocers. There's a Swiss-style school building from 1810 that looks like it wandered in from the wrong country.

St Bartholomew's is the parish church, Grade II* listed, medieval. Jeremy Irons got married there in 1970, which is the sort of fact that only matters if you're the kind of person it matters to. The Free Church, a separate building, was destroyed by bombing in 1941 — one of several reminders that the war reached places you wouldn't expect.

Walking and the Village Story

For walks, there's a weekly group that meets at the library on Station Road, Mondays at eleven. A longer option — four or five miles — leaves from the Free Church car park on the first Monday of each month. The landscape is flat and low-lying, the western edge of the Leicestershire Plain, so the walking is easy rather than dramatic.

The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Carbi in 1086, named for a Danish settler called Caeri who'd turned up a couple of centuries earlier. The population then was eight working souls. The railway arrived in 1848, the station in 1859, and buses still run to Leicester.

A Castle Still Unfinished

On a weekday morning the Royal Oak's deli counter is doing a quiet trade in sourdough and antipasti. The castle sits in its moat, still unfinished after five hundred and forty years.