Broughton

The Last Pub Standing

The Red Lion has five cask pumps and is the last pub standing in a village that once had seven. It's a large corner building of local ironstone, 18th-century, with a long narrow bar at the front and a bigger room behind for the games, the eating and the lounging. Sharp's Doom Bar is the house beer; the rotating pumps have carried Oakham Citra, Fuller's London Pride, Theakston Lightfoot and, at least once, Robinsons Trooper. It's in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide for 2026, which describes it as very much community-focused.

The food is homemade pub grub from local ingredients. Sunday lunches, evening meals Monday to Saturday, and Monday is pie night. There are darts, pool and skittles, live music on Fridays running through rock, blues, folk and country, plus a monthly open mic and a blues jam. For a village of just over two thousand people, it does a lot of work.

Shops, Spire and Lost Village Life

Beyond the pub there isn't much left to shop for. Three small shops and a Post Office tucked into one of them at 44 High Street. This wasn't always the case. Broughton once had a cinema, five bakers, six shops, a petrol station, a butcher and those seven pubs. When The Sun was threatened, locals are said to have driven a tank to Kettering Borough Council offices in protest. It closed anyway.

St Andrew's is the landmark, an octagonal broach spire rising above the rooftops on a west tower ringed with a corbel table of carved heads. Most of the church is early 14th-century, rebuilt around 1290 to 1310, though the south-west corner still incorporates part of a Norman church. The font is late 14th-century, its octagonal bowl elaborately carved, and it's still used for baptisms. Northamptonshire is a county of spires and squires, and this is one of the characteristic ones.

Boots for the Reservoir and Fields

The walking is the reason to have boots. The Cransley Reservoir Circular is about four and a half miles, mostly off-road, with a few hill pulls and no stiles. Longer routes loop out through Great Cransley, Pytchley, Mawsley, Thorpe Malsor and Loddington across gently rolling farmland, and one of them is called the Four Spires walk on the sensible principle that you can see four of them from the fields. Cransley Wood and the reservoir sit to the west.

Two Miles from Kettering

Kettering is two miles off, its station on the Midland Main Line to St Pancras. The A43 bypasses the village, the A14 is close, and buses 48, 50 and X4 run to Kettering's Horse Market. Wicksteed Park, ten minutes away, has been running rides since 1921 and keeps the world's oldest water chute.

The Tin Can Band at Midnight

The thing worth timing a visit for happens at midnight on the first Monday after 12 December. For roughly three hundred years the villagers have processed through the streets banging pots, pans, dustbin lids, spoons and spanners to make as much noise as possible. It's called the Tin Can Band. In 1929 the Parish Council tried to ban it and fined 54 people. The villagers held a dance to raise the money to pay the fines, and some of the older ones were said to display their penalties with pride.