Willoughby on the Wolds

Life Without a Pub or Shop

Willoughby on the Wolds has no pub. It once had three — the Three Horseshoes, a big Shipstones house on Main Street, since demolished; the Plough, which closed around 1864; and the Old Bull's Head, visited by the antiquarian William Stukeley in 1722 and now a private house. For a pint today you drive to the Plough in Wysall, the Windmill or the Hammer & Pincers in Wymeswold, the Crown in Old Dalby, or the Tap & Run in Upper Broughton.

Shops have gone the same way — there's no village shop. Residents order from Milk & More on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and from East Coast Seafood, whose van calls on Tuesday evenings. For a proper shop — Co-op, Sainsbury's, butcher, chemist — Keyworth is the nearer option; Wymeswold has a corner shop and a chemist of its own.

A Quiet Base and an Exceptional Church

It's a quiet place to be based: the roads are lanes, the fields are Wolds pasture, and in winter you'll see riders out with the Quorn Hunt.

The church is the reason to stop here even without a pub. St Mary and All Saints is Grade I listed, its tower and arcades 13th century, its broach spire added in the 14th. The north chantry chapel holds eight alabaster monuments to the Willoughby family, one of the county's most important collections of medieval tomb sculpture — one figure lies in an embroidered robe with a dog at his feet and the sword of justice beside him. Simon Jenkins called it "the rare portrait-like tomb of the judge Sir Richard." A neighbouring monument belongs to Sir Hugh Willoughby, who died in 1448 and was a direct ancestor of the Tudor navigator of the same name, who died with his crew in the Arctic in 1553 searching for a North-East Passage; their ships were found the following spring, everyone aboard dead.

Roman Roads and Wolds Paths

The village sits almost on top of Vernemetum, a Roman posting station on the Fosse Way whose name meant "the great sacred grove," the road still traceable on foot near the Broughton Lodge crossroads. Nearby, a local maths teacher, Malcolm Dean, led the 1960s excavation of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery — around 120 graves, with amber beads from the Baltic and purse rings of East African ivory. On 5 July 1648, a Royalist force marching to relieve Colchester was intercepted here and beaten by Parliamentarian horse under Colonel Edward Rossiter; a brass plaque in the church remembers one of the dead, Michael Stanhope of Shelford, aged twenty-four.

For walking, a waymarked route heads out to Wysall and back across farmland, and a longer loop through Wysall and Wymeswold picks up part of the Mid Shires Way along a ridge above the Trent Valley. Willoughby Wood, a small Woodland Trust site with a pond, is a short walk from the village.

Play, Bowls and Connections

Families are looked after by a community park on the Widmerpool road — swings, a willow tunnel, a football pitch — and by a bowls club approaching its hundredth year, which still runs bingo nights and takes on beginners. The nearest station is Loughborough, about fifteen minutes by car; the Nottsbus 863 stops a nine-minute walk away, and the A46 follows the old line of the Fosse Way to Leicester and Newark.

Keepers of Village Memory

Much of the church's history has been kept by one long-time resident, Brian Thornalley. When a millennium tree was planted, it was his grandson Joshua who helped plant it, with the Reverend Christine Turner presiding — a small ceremony, in a village used to small ceremonies.