The windmill is the first thing you see. Five storeys of local ironstone topped with brick, built around 1814 and originally fitted with six patent sails in a Lincolnshire Cross configuration. It stopped working commercially, fell derelict, and then — through Heritage Lottery funding and a good deal of local stubbornness — was conserved and partially restored in 2017. It now sits at the centre of a seven-acre site that includes a tearoom, craft shops, a barn venue, and a woodland trail. Thirty-five thousand people visit each year, which is roughly fifty-five times the village's population.
Wymondham is pronounced "Windham," which catches people out. It sits in the rolling ironstone country east of Melton Mowbray, a quiet agricultural parish of 632 people in the Borough of Melton. The civil parish takes in the hamlet of Edmondthorpe as well. You reach it via minor roads off the A606, and once you're here, the landscape is open, undramatic, and very good for walking.
The windmill tearoom is where you'll eat. It's award-winning, open all year, 364 days of it, and does breakfast, brunch, lunch, and homemade cakes. Dogs are welcome. There is no pub currently active in the village, so the tearoom carries the full weight of Wymondham's hospitality sector, and by all accounts it manages.
North of the village, the old Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway line offers a flat, surfaced route for walking or cycling. Edmondthorpe and Wymondham station closed to passengers in 1959. Queen Elizabeth II travelled along the line in 1967, though not, by that point, to stop here. The nearest working station is Melton Mowbray. Bus services exist but shouldn't be relied upon with any urgency.
St Peter's Church is Grade II* listed, 13th century, Early English on a cruciform plan. The tower is the oldest part. Its third storey and spire were added later in the Perpendicular style, which gives it a slight architectural split personality — sturdy Norman bones with a more decorative hat. Inside, there's a large stone effigy of a cross-legged knight from the late 1200s. Nobody seems entirely certain who he is. Michael Carrick, the footballer, married Lisa Roughead here in 2007, which is the most recent event the church has made the papers for.
The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Witmeham, among other spellings, in 1086. It had roughly 37 households, putting it in the largest 20 per cent of settlements they catalogued. The manor was held by the Hamelin family during the 1200s. William Hamelin founded a chantry chapel in St Peter's in 1290, giving land in Wymondham, Saxby, and Thorp Edmer to fund a chaplain to celebrate mass in perpetuity. The perpetuity lasted until the Reformation.
Frances Pawlett, a local cheese maker, is credited with establishing the modern shape and style of Stilton cheese here in the 1720s. The cheese is named after a village in Cambridgeshire where it was sold, not where it was made. Wymondham did the work. Stilton got the credit.
The woodland trail on the windmill site loops through seven acres of managed ground, and on a weekday morning you can walk it with nothing but birdsong and the faint smell of cake from the tearoom below.
