A remarkable past, right on our doorstep

Welcome to Kibworth Beauchamp, Kibworth Harcourt and Smeeton Westerby—three villages with thousands of years of history and more plot twists than you might expect. A Beaker-period burial was discovered on Smeeton Hill, ancient tracks once carried people, livestock and traders across the landscape, and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans all left their mark. Medieval Kibworth, recorded under names including Chiburde, formed part of the Gartree Hundred, one of Leicestershire’s old administrative areas. So, whether you are walking along a familiar road or looking across a field, history is rarely more than a few footsteps away.

Even the name Smeeton Westerby carries a clue to the past. Smeeton and Westerby began as separate settlements: Smeeton’s Old English name points to a smith’s village or farmstead, while the Old Norse Westerby means the “western farm”. Westerby probably grew as a Scandinavian settlement just west of the older community. The two eventually became one village—proving that even a place-name can hold on to a very long memory.

The story continued in stone and scholarship. St Wilfrid’s Church—once reputed to have the tallest spire in Leicestershire—has served Kibworth Beauchamp, Kibworth Harcourt and Smeeton Westerby for centuries. Its separate medieval porches were traditionally used by the people of Harcourt and Beauchamp: even on the way into church, village identity mattered. Kibworth also became home to an early free school, opening another important chapter in the community’s history.

The Civil War brought its share of drama, with both Royalist and Parliamentarian soldiers billeted in the villages. The Puritan minister Captain John Yaxley removed St Wilfrid’s ornate medieval font, which later found the rather less dignified job of serving as a horse trough. Happily, it returned to the church in the nineteenth century.

Then the world began travelling past the villages a little faster. The turnpike brought visitors through Kibworth Harcourt and helped inns and hostelries flourish; the A6 followed with still more traffic. When the railway and its station arrived, the villages gained a quicker connection to the wider world—although the traffic has not exactly disappeared.

Local work changed as well. Weavers became framework knitters, workshops and factories opened, and rows of new homes appeared as the population grew. Many long-established family names—including Bailey, Coleman, Hubbard, Bussard, Cobley, Carter, Chapman, Iliffe, Ward, Eastwood, Freeman and West—can still be found here today.

In more recent times, the Olympic flame passed through, and the villages stepped into the national spotlight through Michael Wood’s The Story of England, created with the involvement of many local residents. At this crossroads of England, the past is never far away. Take a look around—there is always another local story waiting to surprise you.

Curious about what happened next? That is where our society comes in.

For more than 30 years, the Kibworth History Society researched and recorded the history of our villages, sharing memories from past residents and creating informative local walks. Its extensive work remains available on the society’s website. Although the group dissolved in 2018, its legacy continued through Kibworth Community Library and the Family History Workshop. Around the same time, Philip J. Porter left them his research into more than 37,000 former residents, asking that it should remain available to the village and wider community. His generous gift prompted a small group of us to begin talking about bringing a local history society back to life.

​And so, in the summer of 2025, the next chapter began. We came together to form the Kibworth & District Heritage Society. Our aims are to carry out new research; collect and preserve documents, photographs and donated collections; arrange talks and exhibitions; and share our discoveries through publications and other activities. We are affiliated with Kibworth Community Library and Community Hub and work with the parish councils, helping to ensure that material entrusted to us remains in Kibworth and is accessible to the local community.

We have recently been entrusted with the work of Isobel Cullum, who was part of the Kibworth Chronicle team for more than 30 years. During that time, she took a remarkable collection of photographs and wrote many fascinating articles. Over the coming years, we will catalogue and organise this material so that it can be viewed at the Hub in Kibworth Community Library. We are very grateful to Isobel’s husband, David; her daughter, Helen; her son, David; and the rest of the family for donating her work to our group.