Somerby

The inn as the main event

The low beam at the bar of the Stilton Cheese Inn has been catching the unwary since roughly 1666. The pub doesn't warn you about it — you learn, or you learn again. Built in local ironstone on the High Street, it has horse brasses on the walls, copper pots, a taxidermied pike and a taxidermied badger, and a reputation for real ale that has kept it in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide every year since 2004. They were named Branch Pub of the Year three times in five years. The regulars are Grainstore Ten Fifty and Wadworth 6X, with three guest ales rotating through. It is, by some margin, the main event in Somerby.

The food is homemade and unfussy. Somerby sausages, steak and kidney pie, salmon with mash, roast chicken, fish and chips, quiche. Sunday lunches come with traditional trimmings. Reviews tend to use phrases like "home cooked, beautifully prepared," which is about the highest compliment a Leicestershire pub can receive. Dogs are welcome. There's a beer garden for the months when Leicestershire decides to cooperate with the concept of summer.

Stilton connections and High Leicestershire

The pub's name has a story behind it. Cooper Thornhill, an 18th-century innkeeper at the Bell Inn in Stilton, Cambridgeshire, sourced his famous cheese from Leicestershire farmers' wives. Under current Protected Designation of Origin rules, Stilton cheese cannot actually be made in the village of Stilton. It must be produced in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, or Derbyshire. Somerby has a stronger claim to the cheese than the place it's named after.

Beyond the pub, the village has a combined shop and post office, which covers the essentials. There's an equestrian centre operating in the parish. Somerby sits in what's called High Leicestershire — rolling ironstone uplands several hundred feet above sea level, largely agricultural, with long views across the Wreake Valley. The stone in the buildings matches the stone in the ground. It looks like it grew here rather than being built.

Walking country and All Saints

If you walk, Somerby is a waypoint on the Leicestershire Round, the hundred-mile circuit devised in 1987 by the Leicestershire Footpath Association. A good circular route starts at Burrough Hill Country Park — six miles, moderate difficulty, about three hours. You descend steeply through farmland, pass through woodland, reach Somerby at the halfway mark, then return via Burrough on the Hill. Ridge-and-furrow patterns in the fields. Brown hares. Skylarks. The kind of walk where you stop to look at things without being entirely sure why.

All Saints Church is Grade I listed, with Norman work from the 12th century and a 13th-century font. The ironstone walls and limestone dressings, the embattled central tower and spire, the Early English and Decorated styles — it has been added to and restored over centuries in the way that English parish churches accumulate time rather than displaying it.

Village history and connections

The Domesday surveyors recorded Somerby in 1086: five villagers, one plough team, ten acres of meadow, valued at three pounds. During the Second World War, the village served as a base station and testing ground for Operation Market Garden, the airborne assault on Arnhem. John Major's daughter married here in 2000. These facts sit next to each other without explanation, which is roughly how village history works.

There's no railway station. Melton Mowbray is five and a half miles north by the B6047, with buses connecting the two. The nearest train is there as well.

The appeal of quiet

On a weekday afternoon, the village is quiet in the way that places with more sheep than people tend to be. The pub opens. The shop is there. The views are doing what they've always done. Somerby doesn't ask much of you, which is most of what makes it worth the visit.