Medbourne

The Brook and the Bridge

The Packhorse Bridge is four arches wide and five feet across, which means you cross it in single file or not at all. It spans the brook that runs through the middle of Medbourne, and it has been doing so since the thirteenth century. The brook is the village's central feature — everything arranges itself around it, and the sound of water is more or less constant.

Medbourne has 473 people, a pub, a village stores with a post office, and a medieval bridge. For a settlement this size, that counts as well-provisioned.

The Inn and the Valley Walks

The pub is the Nevill Arms, an ironstone coaching inn on Waterfall Way. It was built in 1863, bought in 2021 by the Three Goat's Group, and refurbished into a gastropub with ten rooms. The kitchen runs a seasonal à la carte menu and Sunday roasts, supplied in large part by the owners' own farm four miles away — Belted Galloway beef, lamb and pork, with food miles you could measure with a pedometer. Out in a private courtyard there's a Josper Bar & Grill, which uses a Spanish charcoal oven that gives everything a particular char. The Daily Mail put it in their Best 100 Pubs in Britain list in 2024. Dogs are welcome in the bar and outside areas, where a river terrace runs alongside the brook.

The walking is good. A 4.8-mile circular from the Packhorse Bridge takes you through fields to Nevill Holt, where there's a private mansion that now houses a music academy and a summer opera festival. The route gains about 230 metres over gentle Welland Valley farmland — moderate, not punishing. The parish also publishes leaflets for two longer circulars, a 4.5-miler and a 10-miler, both taking in surrounding villages and open country. The Harborough Walks group uses Medbourne as a highlight destination, which tells you something about the landscape.

Getting There and St Giles's

Market Harborough is about ten minutes by car along the B664. Uppingham is fifteen minutes the other way. The village had a railway station once, but it closed in 1916, and bus services are the kind described as "limited rural," which in practice means you'll want a car.

St Giles's Church is Grade II* listed, with origins in the thirteenth century and a chancel rebuilt in 1876. A church here is documented from the late twelfth century, when the manor was held by the king. By 1220 it had spawned daughter chapels at Blaston and Holt.

Romans, Domesday and Bottle Kicking

The village name means "Meadow Stream," which is about as literal as place names get. The Romans knew it too — Medbourne sat on the Via Devana, the road from Leicester to Colchester, and was a substantial market settlement. By the time the Domesday surveyors arrived in 1086, they recorded 10 villagers, 73 freemen, and 32 smallholders working 26 and a half plough teams. The annual value was £10 2s 5d, up from one shilling when the Norman lord first acquired it. That is a considerable return on investment.

Each Easter Monday, Medbourne competes against the neighbouring village of Hallaton in the Bottle Kicking — a mass rugby-style contest across open countryside involving small barrels, two of which contain beer and one of which is a wooden dummy. There are no fixed rules, no set number of players, and matches can last several hours. Records go back to the late eighteenth century. Thousands turn up to watch. The day begins in Hallaton with a hare-pie scrambling ceremony, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The Meadow Stream Refrain

The brook keeps running through the middle of it all, under the bridge, past the pub terrace, the same way it has since the meadow got its name.