The Wheel Inn serves Indian food every evening in a building that used to be a terrace of cottages knocked together. You choose your meat, then you choose your sauce. The signature dishes are Chilli Paneer, the Mixed Grill Sizzler and Paneer Dopiaza, and Tuesday is curry night, where the value is. One reviewer called it "an authentic taste of Indian food"; another warned the prices have gone up. It sits at the junction of Brook Street and Melton Road, a small public bar on the right for locals and dining rooms to the left, and CAMRA lists it as a historic pub — not, as the conservation appraisal puts it, over-modernised.
A few doors along is the Horse & Groom, the more conventional of the two. Four regular beers, a large beer garden, a children's play area, and a long-alley skittles run that doubles as a function room. There are darts, petanque and skittles teams, pizza when the kitchen is on, and live music on Saturday evenings in summer. The bar staff get singled out for praise more often than the menu does.
There are no shops now, and no post office. The old shopfront on the corner of Brook Street survives as a heritage feature, which is the polite term for a shop that has stopped being a shop. For groceries you drive to East Goscote or Syston; Melton Mowbray, eight miles off, is where the pork pie and Stilton come from.
The village arranges itself around Rearsby Brook, willow-lined and crossed by a granite packhorse bridge of seven arches — six easy to spot, the seventh, per the appraisal, "hiding in the grass bank, must be sought for." The bridge was rebuilt in 1714 by, tradition holds, six men in nine days for eleven pounds two shillings and tuppence. Approaching, the whole place looks like a cluster of trees with houses inside it, unusual in the flat arable land around here.
The Leicestershire Round passes straight through, picked up by the convent and running down the Wreake valley to Rotherby and Frisby. A longer circular out to Frisby and Brooksby is eight and a half miles of field paths with no real hills. Local walks cross the fords; at the end of Manor Farm one leads into Bog Lane, described without embellishment as "a muddy footpath and tractor way."
A priest was recorded here in the Domesday Book, so there was already a church. St Michael and All Angels still stands on its low hill north of the brook, largely 13th and 14th century, hidden by trees in summer. John Wesley is said to have preached from the Blue Stone by the brook in 1753; the stone is still there in the grass.
The other fact about Rearsby is aircraft. In 1939 the Taylorcraft factory began building light planes here on a village aerodrome, and the design became the Auster — 1,604 turned out during the war. The site is a business park now.
Syston station is four miles off on the Leicester–Melton line; the village lost its own in 1951. The bypass took the through-traffic out in 2004, which is why Brookside, running east and west along the willow edge, still has the feel of a quiet country street. The ford is where the children go.
