Whitwick

Polly's and the Black Horse

The Three Horseshoes on Silver Street has a quarry-tiled floor, open fires, wooden bench seating, and fittings that haven't been changed since before the Second World War. Everyone calls it Polly's, after Polly Burton, a former landlady whose family ran the place for over a hundred years until 2017. It's on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, which is one of the most protected designations a pub can get in England. There's no kitchen to speak of — crusty cobs, jacket potatoes with fillings on the first Wednesday of the month, and whatever's on the hand pumps. Dogs are welcome.

The building started as two cottages in the early nineteenth century and became a pub in 1882. It was Grade II listed, which in this case feels less like heritage protection and more like common sense.

Down the road, the Black Horse does filled cobs, live music at weekends, and has a beer garden where dogs can join you. It's the louder option.

Volcanic Woods and Priory Ruins

Whitwick sits within the Charnwood Forest, which is not what most people picture when they hear "Leicestershire." The landscape here is ancient volcanic rock, wooded hills, craggy outcrops. Grace Dieu Woods run south of the village along a brook, creating a corridor of old oak and ash woodland that feels substantially older than anything built on top of it.

The best walk from the village is the Grace Dieu Viaduct and Priory Ruins loop — about four and a half miles, easy going, starting from the Bulls Head car park in neighbouring Thringstone. You pass beneath the stone arches of the former Charnwood Forest Railway viaduct, through the woods, and arrive at the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory. The priory was founded around 1239 by Roesia de Verdun for Augustinian nuns who wore white habits and called themselves the White Nuns of St Augustine. They were thought to be the only house of their order in the country. Sixteen nuns were recorded there in 1337. Henry VIII dissolved it in 1538. The walls still stand in the woods, scheduled and atmospheric.

For something shorter, Holly Hayes Wood offers a circular through the same Charnwood Forest landscape of volcanic rock and craggy hills.

Church and Domesday Whitwick

St John the Baptist church is Grade II* listed and sits in a natural amphitheatre near the meeting of two streams. Predominantly fourteenth century, restored in 1848. One of the older ecclesiastical buildings in this part of Leicestershire.

The Domesday Book recorded the place as Witewic in 1086, held by Hugh de Grandmesnil. The surveyors found land for half a plough and a patch of woodland measuring a furlong by half a furlong. They valued the whole thing at two shillings.

Monastery and Mining

A more recent arrival: Mount St Bernard Abbey, founded in 1835 in Whitwick's parish, was the first permanent monastery established in England since the Reformation and remains the country's only Trappist house. Pugin designed the church. The monks are still there, and since 2018 they've been brewing Tynt Meadow, a Trappist dark ale — one of only around fourteen beers in the world carrying the Authentic Trappist Product mark. A monastery that's outlasted the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and two world wars, and now it makes beer.

Coal mining dominated here from the nineteenth century. Whitwick Colliery was one of the major pits in the Coalville area. An underground fire in 1898 killed thirty-five miners. Before coal, the village ran on framework knitting.

Arriving and Settling In

There's no railway station — the Charnwood Forest Railway closed to passengers in 1931. Loughborough and Leicester are the nearest stations. Buses run to Coalville, which is about two miles south and has whatever the village doesn't.

On a weekday afternoon, Polly's is the kind of pub where the regulars know which seat is whose, and a stranger walking in gets looked at exactly once before everyone goes back to their pints.