An avenue of limes leads up to Langar Hall, a stuccoed, apricot-washed Georgian house dating from 1837. It's a restaurant with rooms now, run by Lila Arora, granddaughter of Imogen Skirving, who converted the family home into a hotel so guests would feel invited to dinner by a dear friend. The kitchen uses game from the Belvoir estate and vegetables from its own garden, heartier classics on Sundays and Mondays, finer dining the rest of the week. Alastair Sawday summed it up as "Stubbornly English, Deliciously Stylish, Quietly Eccentric."
The pub is the Unicorn's Head, a Grade II listed coaching inn dating to 1717 that started life as The Feathers and was renamed in 1799 after the estate's new owner, banker John Wright — the unicorn's head is a feature of the Howe family coat of arms. There's a beer garden, popular with families, dogs welcome in the bar, food running to sausage rolls, fish and chips, a 10oz steak under £20, and a Sunday roast that puts beef, pork and lamb on the same plate with all the trimmings. Three courses and a couple of drinks on a Saturday night comes to just under £40 a head — pricy, reviewers reckon, but not ridiculous. Through November and December it hosts the Langar Essential Village Market on Fridays, traders selling breakfast, lunch and odds you forgot to buy in town.
For shopping, Delucy's Deli and a stall-based operation called Belvoir Bakery share a site on Barnstone Road that used to be a saw mill and wheelwright's workshop. North of the old airfield, Naturescape Wildflower Farm grows 200 acres of native wildflower seed, Britain's largest producer of it, 45 acres open to walk through with a coffee shop at the end.
The airfield itself, RAF Langar until 1963, is now home to Skydive Langar, run from the old control tower and, by its own account, the busiest civilian skydiving centre in the country: over 50,000 jumps a year off three turbine Cessna Grand Caravans.
St Andrew's is nicknamed the Cathedral of the Vale, a cruciform 13th-century church built on a scale that suggests a pilgrimage site. The Howe family vault holds Admiral Richard Howe, hero of the Glorious First of June; his monument by Flaxman stands in St Paul's Cathedral, but his body stays at Langar. Novelist Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, was born at the rectory in 1835, son of the vicar who later restored it.
The Domesday Book valued Langar at £5 in 1066 and £10 by 1086 — the Conquest, for once, was good for business.
Walking routes follow the old Grantham Canal, disused since the 1920s and now a footpath with the Belvoir escarpment on the skyline, or head out to Colston Bassett and Cropwell Bishop, both still making Stilton. Aslockton, the nearest station, is about four and a half miles off; Bingham, much the same distance, is said to run trains toward Nottingham and Grantham — worth checking first. The 833 bus runs through Orston and Granby to Bingham, the nearest shopping town, about four miles north.
There's a pond by the recreation field, a play area over in Barnstone, and not much else in the way of announcement. Most people who stay seem to work that out fairly quickly and stop looking for more.
