Swithland

The Griffin's Many Lives

The Griffin Inn has been, at various points in its three centuries, a brewery, a bakery, and the village mortuary. It is now a gastropub owned by Stuart Broad and Harry Gurney, the England and Nottinghamshire cricketers, which is not the obvious career pivot but seems to be working. It won Leicestershire Pub of the Year in both 2023 and 2024.

The menu does what you'd expect and then a bit more. Venison pie, chicken and ham pie, pan-fried seabass, hake, a tofu and sweet potato Malay curry. On Fridays and Saturdays they run a pizza kitchen on the lawn, weather permitting, which in Leicestershire is a brave business model. Weekday lunches are two courses for twenty pounds. The Sunday roasts get mentioned repeatedly in the reviews, as does the pricing, which is on the ambitious side. Dogs are welcome on the hard floors. Muddy boots too.

One Pub and Thirty-One Listed Buildings

That is, essentially, the village's amenities. There are no shops. The Griffin is doing the heavy lifting.

Swithland sits in the Charnwood Forest, between Cropston and Woodhouse Eaves, and it is built almost entirely from the stuff it's standing on. Stone walls, slate roofs, slate gravestones — thirty-one listed buildings within a conservation area designated in 1993. The slate here is blue-grey, heavier and coarser than Welsh slate, but the locals carved it with a precision that made the material famous across two counties. You can still read Swithland slate headstones in churchyards throughout Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, the lettering as sharp as the day it was cut.

Slate, the Danvers Family and St Leonard's

The quarrying goes back to Roman times. By the thirteenth century it was a serious industry, and the Danvers family, who bought the entire village in 1509, profited from it handsomely for nearly three hundred years.

St Leonard's Church is where the Danvers money ended up. It's Grade II* listed, built from granite and slate rubble with a tower that starts in the thirteenth century and finishes in the fifteenth. Inside, the slate monuments to the Danvers and Butler families are the main event. Pevsner singled out a mid-eighteenth-century memorial to the children of Sir John Danvers, calling it "a tour de force of the slate workers." There's also an organ inscribed John Snetzler 1765 — Snetzler was George III's preferred organ builder, which is not the commission you'd expect to find in a village this size.

Woodland, Reservoir and the Hall Estate

For walking, you have two good options. Swithland Wood is ancient semi-natural woodland managed by the Bradgate Park Trust, thick with bluebells in spring, with streams and old slate outcrops still visible among the trees. Swithland Reservoir, completed in 1896, has a quiet lakeside path that draws walkers and cyclists. The Great Central Railway — now a heritage steam line — runs through the area, though a station was planned for Swithland and never built. Only the exchange sidings were constructed. The village remains accessible primarily by car, via the B5330 toward Woodhouse Eaves and Loughborough.

On the estate of Swithland Hall stands the Mountsorrel Cross, a Grade I listed medieval market cross from around 1500, relocated here in 1793 as an ornamental feature. The original hall burned down in 1822. The current one, built on a different site in 1852, survived.

A Summer Evening at the Griffin

On a Friday evening in summer, the pizza kitchen is running on the Griffin's lawn, and the tables fill with walkers who've come down through the wood. It's a village that quarried its own stone, built its own walls, carved its own gravestones, and now has exactly one pub doing everything else.