St Egelwin the Martyr sits on a small hill at the centre of Scalford, which is appropriate for a church that is the only one in England dedicated to this particular saint. Nobody is entirely sure who St Egelwin was. The church itself dates from around 1100 AD, with bits added in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it once had the fourth-highest spire in Leicestershire. That spire collapsed on 19 January 1636, taking part of the vicarage with it. The tower was rebuilt three years later. Services are held on the first and third Sundays of each month.
Scalford is a small village four miles north of Melton Mowbray, at the southern end of the Vale of Belvoir. The landscape rolls. The Jubilee Way long-distance footpath passes through on its route from Melton Mowbray to Belvoir Castle, which makes the village a natural stopping point if you're walking between the two.
The Kings Arms is the surviving pub, and it earns its survival. It's a rustic village local doing traditional English food with locally sourced produce — the homemade pies come up repeatedly in reviews, and the Sunday roast is a proper one. They stock Belvoir Presse soft drinks, which is a nice local touch. There's a heated beer garden to the rear, dogs are welcome, and they do B&B rooms if you'd rather not drive home. It scores 4.2 out of 5 on TripAdvisor, which for a village pub in north Leicestershire is quietly impressive.
The village once supported three pubs. The Black Horse was trading from at least 1747; The Plough was the third. Both have closed.
In fact, quite a lot has closed. The Old Bakery operated from 1906 to 1997. William Wright's grocery and drapery store, which doubled as the post office from 1879, is gone. In the Victorian and Edwardian period, Scalford had three bakers, a blacksmith, stonemasons, builders, a shoe-mender, multiple shops, garages and two pubs. There is now a kitchen-based post office with limited groceries. There is also a garden centre that has won gold at Sandringham since 2008, which is not nothing.
The most significant loss was the Scalford Dairy. The Scalford Farmer's Co-operative established it in 1906, and for ninety years it produced Blue Stilton cheese. EU hygiene modernisation requirements closed it in May 1996, and production moved to Hartington in Derbyshire. The site has been redeveloped. Four of the licensed Stilton dairies are based in the Vale of Belvoir, and Scalford's was among the most significant.
The Domesday surveyors split the estate between Countess Judith and Robert of Bucy. Judith's portion was valued at three pounds annually, Robert's at one pound and two shillings. The total recorded population was approximately 32.5 households, which raises questions about what half a household looked like in 1086.
There's no railway. The GNR and LNWR Joint Line lost its passenger services in 1953 and closed entirely in 1962. Buses run to Melton Mowbray, and the B676 connects you to Grantham.
Below the village, archaeologists have found evidence of a substantial Roman villa — mosaics, painted wall plaster, hypocaust heating. The Romans, it seems, also thought this was a reasonable spot. The name Scalford comes from the Old English for "the shallow ford," referring to a crossing of the River Scald. Christopher Saxton spelled it this way on his 1576 atlas, and the spelling stuck.
The brickyards ran from about 1875 to 1930. The master's residence, Lion House, still stands, named after the brickyard company. It's one of those details that tells you more about a village's past than any plaque could — that there was enough clay, enough demand, and enough ambition here to name a house after the enterprise.
