The Manners Arms reopened in spring 2025 after three years shut, which in village pub terms is long enough for people to have started grieving. It's a Grade II listed former shooting lodge built between 1774 and 1790 for the chaplain to the 5th Duke of Rutland, later earmarked as a dower house for Violet, the 8th Duchess, who took one look and moved to Eastwell Hall instead. The building became a pub in the late twentieth century under the name Red House Inn, was renamed The Manners Arms in 2005 at the 11th Duke's request, and has now emerged from refurbishment as a ten-bedroom country house hotel with an AA 4-Star rating.
The menu is modern British and leans on the Belvoir Estate for its seasonal game. You can get pan-fried foie gras with caramelised apple, seared scallops with crab risotto and porcini foam, or fillet of beef with braised faggot and creamed spinach. There's also chicken Kiev stuffed with smoky bacon, beer-battered fish with hand-cut chips, and a roasted tomato and basil tart for vegetarians. Sunday roast. Light bar meals if you just want to sit and not think about it.
It is, essentially, the village. Knipton has no shop. It has the pub, the church, and a collection of ironstone estate cottages that belong to the Duke of Rutland's Belvoir Castle estate. The cottages are the ornamental kind — cottages ornées, if you want the term — built in the nineteenth-century picturesque style, which means they look like someone designed them to be painted rather than lived in.
All Saints' Church has a thirteenth-century west tower and a nave from the fourteenth. The south aisle was added in 1869, which makes it the newest thing in the village by some margin. Two listed table tombs sit in the churchyard. Nearby, the old primary school — built 1850, closed 1854, four years of education — is now the village hall. It's Mock Tudor.
For walking, the best thing here is Knipton Reservoir. Fifty-two acres of water built in 1797 to feed the Grantham Canal, which was thought to be the first canal in England to rely on floodwater reservoirs. The serpentine dam is crossed by Croxton Avenue, a riding that cuts through parkland designed in the Capability Brown tradition, with planted views toward church spires. Historic England added the reservoir to the Belvoir Castle registered landscape. It's a functional piece of late-Georgian engineering that someone made beautiful because they could afford to.
The Grantham Canal towpath is walkable from the village area, and the wider Vale of Belvoir spreads out around you — flat, green, agricultural, and quietly one of the better landscapes in the East Midlands.
Domesday Book recorded Knipton with 33 households, including four slaves, and six mills valued at thirteen shillings and twopence. By 1931 the population was 273. The parish was abolished in 1936 and folded into Belvoir. Iron ore quarrying ran from the 1920s through 1964, which explains a few scars in the landscape if you know where to look.
Three bus services run on weekdays between Melton Mowbray and Grantham. Grantham station is about nine miles east, with East Midlands Railway and LNER services north and south.
The 5th Duke bought the Red House and its mortgage for £750 in 1802. The Manners family have held Belvoir Castle since the sixteenth century. The pub, the cottages, the reservoir, the land — it all belongs to the same estate. Knipton isn't a village that happens to be near a castle. It exists because one is there.
