Whitwick

Pub Life in Whitwick

At 11 Leicester Road, the Three Horseshoes has a quarry-tiled floor, open fires, wooden bench seating and pre-war fittings. Nicknamed Polly's after former landlady Polly Burton, it remained in her family's hands for more than a century, until 2017. The Grade II listed pub grew from two nineteenth-century cottages, with a front range added in 1882. Its nationally important interior appears in the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. Crusty cobs, jacket potatoes with fillings on the first Wednesday of the month and cask ales make this a simple pub stop. Dogs are welcome.

Leicester Road developed largely between 1850 and 1900 as Whitwick expanded around coal mining. Its surviving buildings still mark that period of village growth.

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 north 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.

A walk through Grace Dieu Woods to the priory ruins starts from the Bulls Head car park in neighbouring Thringstone, about 1.4 miles from Whitwick in a straight line; the road journey is longer. 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

The Charnwood Forest Railway ceased passenger service in 1931, leaving Whitwick without a station. From Leicester Road, Loughborough is the nearest station, about seven miles away in a straight line. Buses link Whitwick with Coalville, roughly two miles to the south.

The village pubs and historic church make natural stops before or after a walk through Charnwood Forest and the Grace Dieu woods.