The Plough Inn on Main Street doubles as Stathern's post office three days a week, which tells you most of what you need to know about the village's approach to efficiency. It's also the only pub left. The Red Lion, a seventeenth-century inn that once held a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a place in The Times' 25 best country pubs for food, closed suddenly in 2017. There were campaigns. There were petitions. Last anyone heard, someone wanted to turn it into six houses.
So The Plough carries the village now, and it does the job. It's a freehouse pouring Belvoir Brewery Star ale — brewed a few miles up the road — alongside a menu that runs from David Cox's sausages with creamed potatoes to steak and Star ale pie to an Indian-style chicken curry. Wednesdays are fish and chip suppers. Fridays are pie day. Sunday brings a proper carvery: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding or pork. There's a pool table, a darts board, and BT Sport on the big screen if you need it.
The village is built of local ironstone, warm and orange-brown, sitting in the Vale of Belvoir about ten miles north of Melton Mowbray. It's walking country — the Belvoir ridge runs along the skyline and footpaths connect Stathern to the surrounding ironstone villages. The Stathern Heritage group publishes a visitors' guide if you want structure, though most of the vale rewards aimless wandering just as well.
St Guthlac's stands at the centre, Grade II* listed, consecrated around 1200. The dedication is unusual — Guthlac was a seventh-century Lincolnshire hermit-saint, patron of Crowland Abbey, which suggests the site may predate the Norman Conquest. The church is ironstone like the rest of the village. In 1925 it became the first church in Leicestershire to get electricity. Peterhouse, Cambridge has been its sole patron since 1530.
The poet George Crabbe served as curate here from 1785 to 1789. Three of his children were baptised at St Guthlac's, and it was during his time in Stathern that he began writing seriously. His poem "The Village" drew on what he saw in the vale — not always flatteringly.
Stathern's other historical claim involves Colonel Francis Hacker, a Parliamentarian who lived at the seventeenth-century Stathern Hall. Local legend says the execution warrant for Charles I was signed at the Red Lion. This has never been proved. What is established is that Hacker guarded the King during his trial and supervised the execution on 30 January 1649. The Domesday surveyors recorded about 35 households here in 1086, putting it in the largest fifth of Leicestershire settlements. The population in 2011 was 728. Nine centuries of modest but persistent growth.
Bottesford station is about eight miles away on the East Midlands Railway line, and an hourly weekday bus connects to Melton Mowbray if you'd rather not drive.
The Enclosure Plan for Stathern was agreed at a meeting in the Red Lion in August 1790. The building where they carved up the common land, where a regicide may or may not have signed a king's death warrant, where the Good Pub Guide once sent people for peppered beef salad with Colston Bassett Stilton — that building might become houses now. The Plough, meanwhile, keeps pulling pints and selling stamps.
