East Leake

A horn at the old village centre

St Mary’s Church keeps a 7ft 9in vamping horn. It amplified a bass singer’s part in the church’s gallery orchestra and was still used in the mid-19th century.

The old village centre gives way to East Leake’s rolling farmland, part of the Nottinghamshire Wolds. Kingston Brook cuts through this landscape, and ridge-and-furrow earthworks survive in nearby pasture.

Village pubs with character

The Nag's Head, on Main Street, is a two-room village pub with fires and a beer garden. The bookable stable/function room has a dartboard, while dogs are allowed in the bar only.

At 78 Main Street, the Bulls Head is a contemporary village pub with Fuller's London Pride and Dark Star Hophead as regular beers, plus outdoor seating and water bowls and treats for dogs on leads.

Food stops and footpaths

Bryer’s on Gotham Road is a wood-fired restaurant with speciality coffee and wine; Birds Bakery is at 8 Gotham Road.

Walking starts from Meadow Park, eighteen hectares of farmland gifted to the village by the Kirk family in 1995, with an outdoor gym and a playground. Footpaths lead north to the Midshires Way near Rushcliffe Halt, on the old Great Central Railway line, and a figure-of-eight route over the Gotham and West Leake hills gives views across the Trent Valley. Rushcliffe Golf Club, formed in 1909 on the outskirts, does a Sunday carvery.

Skirmish, frames and baskets

Domesday records "1 church" here on Henry of Ferrers's land, the earliest trace of St Mary's, alongside thirty-seven recorded households. In 1644, Royalist and Parliamentary troops fought a skirmish in a field called Brickley on the village's east side; the parish register notes it plainly: "ffoure souldiers buryed slaine in a Skirmish in our Lordship September ye 17th."

The village made things, once. Framework knitters worked up to sixty hand frames before factories undercut them in the 1880s, and from around 1830 the Mills family wove willow baskets “of every shape and size,” reputedly supplying the Savoy Hotel, until plastic ended the trade by 1960. Nottingham City Transport’s South Notts 1 connects East Leake with Nottingham and Loughborough.

The quarry's rare visitors

In 2017, seven adult European bee-eaters were recorded at East Leake quarry. Three pairs nested and chicks hatched, but all three nests were abandoned in early August after cool, wet weather.