Kenilworth

Historic inns and town tables

The Virgins & Castle stands at 7 High Street and has been serving since 1563, when it opened as the Two Virgins Inn. It is reckoned the oldest pub in Kenilworth, and during the years the castle belonged to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, it is said to have hosted the Court of the Castle Manor. These days it does breakfasts, lunches and Sunday roasts, and sits among the town's best-rated pubs. That is a long run for one address.

Kenilworth is not short of alternatives. In Little Virginia, one of the oldest corners of the town, the family-run Clarendon Arms keeps well-maintained hand-pulled ales and welcomes dogs. On Mill End, near the Common, the Engine is the sort of place locals describe as loved and friendly. The Lion, on Warwick Road in the middle of the shopping streets, holds a Cask Marque and serves homemade food all day. The Green Man runs a beer garden and weekly quizzes, and the Bear & Ragged Staff takes its name from the heraldic badge of the Earls of Warwick. The Wetherspoon is called the Dictum of Kenilworth, after the legal settlement of 1266 that reconciled the rebel barons with the Crown. Few chain pubs carry a thirteenth-century treaty for a name.

Abbey Fields and the Common

The independent shops run along Warwick Road and through the old town near the castle. The green heart of the place is Abbey Fields, sixty-eight acres in the valley of the Finham Brook, with a lake, an outdoor swimming pool, veteran trees and the surviving ruins of St Mary's Abbey — a gatehouse, a barn and scattered fragments. A circular walk of about 1.6 miles from the castle car park takes in the castle, the abbey ruins, the lake and St Nicholas Church. For a longer walk, the Kenilworth loop on the Millennium Way runs to 6.8 miles. East along the brook, Kenilworth Common is gorse and heather, and good for watching kingfishers.

The Norman doorway

St Nicholas is a Grade I church with Norman foundations and a fourteenth-century Gothic body. Its elaborate west doorway is thought to have been salvaged from St Mary's Abbey after the dissolution in 1538, possibly reassembled from several abbey doorways; Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood called it "the most sumptuous Norman doorway in Warwickshire." The churchyard spreads across much of the old abbey site.

Nine centuries at the castle

The castle is Kenilworth's centrepiece. Geoffrey de Clinton built the keep in the 1120s; King John dammed the brook into a great lake; John of Gaunt added the palace apartments. In 1266 its garrison held out against Henry III for six months, one of the longest sieges in medieval England. In 1575 Dudley entertained Elizabeth I here for nineteen days at a reputed cost of about £1,000 a day. The buildings are red sandstone, the same stone as the church.

Rail, road and a local invention

Kenilworth station reopened in 2018, on the Coventry–Leamington line, and the town sits on the A452, roughly midway between Warwick and Coventry. In 1869 a local whitesmith named Edward Langley Fardon demonstrated the first bicycle with wire-spoked wheels and rubber tyres.