Cropwell Bishop

Two village pubs

The Wheatsheaf sits on Nottingham Road directly opposite the Cropwell Bishop Creamery, which tells you most of what you need to know about this village before you've had a drink. It's the older of the two pubs, a former coaching inn dating from the 1600s, with a main bar and two snugs and a landlady, Carla, who writes the menu up on a chalkboard fresh each day. Scampi and chips comes generous and around eleven pounds. The lasagne gets singled out in reviews, alongside Carla's own Greek salad, roast dinners and burgers. There's a beer garden with heaters for when the weather doesn't cooperate, and food runs Wednesday to Saturday until seven. One Tripadvisor review is simply titled "A fabulous traditional village pub," which undersells Nev and Carla's welcome but gets the essentials right.

The Chequers, on Church Street, is the newer and more sociable of the two — recently refurbished, a 4.6 Google rating, three cask ales, and a beer garden with a decent car park attached. Thursday is pizza night, Friday fish and chips, cooked properly according to the reviews. It shows the football and rugby, has a seniors' and children's menu, and serves food seven days a week. The village once had five pubs, back when the gypsum works were running at full tilt. The Lime Kiln, on the corner of Colston Road and Swab's Lane, is a nursery now.

The home of Cropwell Bishop Stilton

Across from the Wheatsheaf, the Creamery itself is the reason people come. The Skailes family has been making cheese here since 1847, and Cropwell Bishop is one of only six dairies on earth licensed to produce Blue Stilton under its Protected Designation of Origin — a fact the village wears with no particular fuss. Cousins Robin and Ben Skailes run it day to day now, alongside their fathers David and Ian, the fourth generation in the business. The Blue Stilton took a three-star Great Taste Award in 2023. The shop sells jams, pickles, cheese biscuits and cheeseboards alongside the Stiltons, and staff will let you taste before you buy. Gary Jowett's butchers does its own sausages and pies and stocks the local Stilton too; Cropwell Farm Shop, with its own butchery, sells grass-reared beef and home-bred lamb.

Eight centuries at St Giles'

St Giles' Church is Grade I listed, its chancel dating to around 1215, the tower added around 1450. Six bells hang in it, one from the 16th century, and the pews still carry their carved poppy-head ends from the early 1400s. A beam in the south porch has 27 August 1608 cut into it, and nobody recorded why.

The canal, Hoe Hill and the wider vale

The Grantham Canal runs along the edge of the village, dry in this stretch but walkable the whole way — a five-mile circular route heads out past Odd House Farm to Owthorpe and its fishponds before doubling back over Spencer's Bridge. Hoe Hill rises to the north-west, and on a clear day the Vale of Belvoir opens out beyond it with Belvoir Castle visible on its ridge. Bingham station is the nearest, a little over three miles off; the 833 bus runs hourly into town from Church Street.

A village race preserved on film

The village's other claim to fame is a 1952 point-to-point horse race, filmed on the day, the footage now kept at the Cinema Museum in London — a village with fewer than two thousand people, quietly on file.