East Leake

A horn at the old village centre

St Mary's Church keeps a vamping horn 7ft 9in long, the largest of only six left in England. It was used inside to hum the bass line during services, then carried outside to call the village to worship — audible, apparently, up to a mile away. A 19th-century display board beneath it calls it a trumpet. It isn't one.

The church sits at the centre of the old village, and East Leake still radiates out from it the way an Anglo-Saxon settlement would. You're in the Soar wolds here, a shallow valley crossed by the Sheepwash Brook and Kingston Brook, with ridge-and-furrow patterns still visible in the surrounding fields.

Three different village pubs

Three pubs, each doing something different. The Nag's Head, on Main Street, is run by Rich Proctor and Rebecca Wells and centres on an inglenook fireplace — a recent refurbishment left it, in the landlord's words, "much lighter and inviting" while keeping the character. Dogs are welcome, the beer garden has darts, and CAMRA members get 15p off a pint.

The Bulls Head, at 78 Main Street, has been licensed since at least 1855 and reopened in 2023 after a heavy refurbishment. It runs to over a hundred beers and ciders, keeps Fuller's London Pride and Dark Star Hophead on regularly, and stocks water bowls and treats for dogs on leads. The Three Horseshoes on Brookside makes a third — a 1960s rebuild of a much older pub, mid-refurbishment as this is written.

Food counters and footpaths

For food to take away, Bryer's on Gotham Road is a delicatessen, coffee house and wine shop selling meats, cheeses, cakes, pastries and bread, with Birds Bakery a few doors along. The old butcher's, Elms Farm, closed in April 2024 after three years — partner Jenny Brown put it down to "costs and lack of use by people coming into the shop" — and plans have gone in to turn the premises into a wine and cocktail bar.

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. Loughborough station is 7.9 miles off, and the Nottingham City Transport 1 runs through every fifteen minutes at peak times.

The quarry's rare visitors

In 2017, a pair of rare European bee-eaters — a bird that breeds mostly around the Mediterranean — nested at the CEMEX quarry just outside the village and stayed long enough to be noticed.