Thurcaston

Four centuries at the crossroads

The Wheatsheaf Inn has been standing at Thurcaston's only crossroads for about 400 years, which is long enough to have seen the thatched roof replaced with tiles and the coaching trade replaced with Saturday morning breakfasts. It started life as two cottages around 1600 and is now an Everards tied house with a central bar, several small panelled rooms arranged around it, and a skittle alley that doubles as a function room. Everards Tiger is the permanent fixture on the pumps, with a guest beer alongside it.

The food is home-cooked and, by multiple accounts, generously portioned. The mini fish and chips, sausage and mash, and scampi and fries come up repeatedly in reviews, with phrases like "serious flavour" attached to them. Dogs are welcome in the tap room. There are patios at the rear. Soar Valley Life named it Pub of the Month in October 2023, which for a village with one pub is either redundant or well deserved.

A ridge above Leicester

Thurcaston sits about five miles north of Leicester, on a gentle ridge where the suburbs give way to proper countryside. The A46 bypass draws a line between the two. There are no specialist food shops in the village — it's residential, and Leicester is close enough that nobody seems to mind. A Centrebus 154 runs roughly hourly into the city if you don't have a car.

The walking, though, is the thing. Rothley Brook flows through the village, and footpaths follow it through water meadows that feel considerably further from a city of 350,000 than five miles. A wider outing takes you west through Cropston towards Bradgate Park; the walking distance depends on which entrance you use. Eight hundred and fifty acres of Charnwood Forest terrain — granite outcrops, dry-stone walls, ancient deer park, herds of red and fallow deer wandering through the ruins of Bradgate House, where Lady Jane Grey grew up before her nine days as queen. Cropston Reservoir, built in 1870, is visible from higher ground to the north-west. The walks connect into a broader network through Swithland Wood, all of it on characteristic Charnwood ground: acid-heath grassland and the kind of landscape that looks bleak in February and extraordinary in May.

A Norman doorway and a reformer

All Saints church has been here in some form since before the Normans arrived. The original building may have been wooden. What survives from the Norman rebuild is the South Door, still used as the main entrance, which means you walk through a doorway that has been admitting parishioners for the best part of a thousand years. Inside, the north aisle holds one of the earliest surviving chancel screens in England, repositioned from its original location. The nave roof has stone grotesques at the principals, which is unusual for this part of the Midlands.

The village's most famous son is Hugh Latimer, born here around 1485 to a yeoman farmer. He became Bishop of Worcester, chaplain to Edward VI, and one of the most influential preachers of the English Reformation. In 1555, Mary I had him burned at the stake outside Balliol College, Oxford. His words to Nicholas Ridley as the flames were lit — "we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out" — became one of the most quoted sentences of the sixteenth century. A memorial in the chancel at All Saints commemorates him. He had come back to Thurcaston in retirement in 1550, five years before his death.

Turchitelestone in Domesday

The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Turchitelestone — a farmstead associated with a man called Þórketill, which is Old Norse grafted onto Old English, the kind of name that tells you the Vikings settled here but didn't bother renaming everything. In 1086 it had thirty households, four ploughlands, a mill, and four slaves.

The bell and the brook

The oldest bell in the tower dates to 1525. It still rings over a village where the crossroads pub is older than most cities, and the brook still runs through the meadows as if nobody built a bypass at all.