The Woodman's Stroke — known locally as the Woodies — is a thatched free house next to the parish church with a beer garden that rolls downhill to Rothley Brook. It keeps three regular real ales plus a guest that changes fast enough to suggest someone's drinking them, and a real cider. Leicester CAMRA named it Rural Pub of the Year in 2024. Dogs are welcome in the extensive outdoor areas, where there are heated parasols, gazebos, and a petanque piste, though not inside during daytime food service. The weekday lunch menu is good home-cooked food, which in this case means actual home-cooked food rather than the phrase people use when they mean microwaved.
Walk down to Woodgate and you'll find the Blue Bell Inn, eighteenth-century, with a blue facade that earns its name honestly. It reopened in March 2014 after a major refurbishment. The restaurant is in a former skittle alley. Three changing ales from local brewers, and they'll take your muddy boots, your children, and your dog without complaint. The Royal Oak on Cross Green is an Everards house pulling Old Original and Tiger, with a courtyard garden and play equipment for children who have opinions about how long adults spend in pubs.
Three pubs for a village this size is generous. So is the shopping. North's Deli — also known as Dominic at David North — has been a family-run patisserie and deli for over fifty years. There's a post office, a florist, Bradley's mini-market, and a Central Co-op on Loughborough Road if you need to buy things at normal prices.
The village is arranged around two greens, Cross Green and Town Green, with Rothley Brook threading between them. You're on the southern edge of Charnwood Forest, where the geology is Pre-Cambrian and nationally significant, which is the sort of thing that matters more once you see the landscape it produces. The brook tumbles over Mountsorrel granodiorite boulders in a small waterfall. Walking options run from a gentle four-mile loop through Rothley Park to a seven-and-a-half-mile circuit that takes in Cropston Reservoir and the edge of Bradgate Park's 850 acres. Swithland Reservoir and the Mountsorrel and Rothley Marshes wetland reserve are close by.
Rothley station, on the Great Central Railway, opened on 15 March 1899 and has been restored to its Edwardian appearance. It never had mains electricity before British Rail closed it — the platform is still entirely lit by gas lamps. The line runs eight miles between Loughborough Central and Leicester North, the only double-track main line heritage railway in the country. First-class dining is available on the Rothley Rose.
The Domesday surveyors recorded the village as Rodolei, held directly by the Crown. It was a manor and soke with twenty-two dependent hamlets and over five hundred recorded inhabitants, which made it substantial by eleventh-century standards. The Knights Templar established a preceptory here around 1231, and a 1309 inventory lists a hall, chapel, dormitory, stables, kitchen, bakery, and brewery. The chapel, built around 1240, survives inside what is now the Rothley Court Hotel, a Grade I listed building. Inside it sits a Templar knight effigy that was found in the churchyard in 1790, lost, rediscovered in 2004 being used as rockery stones, and restored in 2011 for two thousand pounds.
St Mary the Virgin and St John the Baptist has Norman foundations in the tower and a font bowl carved with chevron patterns. In the churchyard there's a Saxon cross shaft dating from somewhere between the mid-ninth and early eleventh century. Thomas Babington Macaulay — historian, poet, Secretary at War — was born at Rothley Temple in 1800, in the house of his uncle Thomas Babington.
The 127 bus runs to Leicester in twenty-six minutes and Loughborough in twenty-four, every fifteen minutes in both directions, which for a village is almost urban.
The gas lamps at the station still get lit by hand.
