The name itself records what the Normans saw when they arrived. Bel-vedeir, in the old French, means 'the beautiful view' - a description rather than a place-name, attached by the new aristocracy to the spur of high ground that rises above the surrounding Vale. The vale is a broad agricultural plain extending across parts of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, and the spur of Belvoir juts northwards into it like the prow of a ship. Anyone standing at the castle's edge in the right weather can see for thirty miles across the patchwork of fields. The Normans named honestly; the view is still there.

Belvoir Castle stands on that spur, the residence of the Manners family - the Dukes of Rutland - and the third castle to occupy this site since the eleventh century. The first was a Norman motte-and-bailey thrown up shortly after the Conquest. The current building is Regency Gothic, designed by James Wyatt and completed by others - including Sir John Thoroton - after a fire in 1816 destroyed much of the interior, with the medieval foundations still buried somewhere underneath. Down the slope, the village was also once home to Belvoir Priory, a small Benedictine house dissolved at the Reformation - the priory's name survives even though its buildings do not. Iron ore was quarried in the parish for centuries, mostly near Harston and Knipton, where the workings cut into the ironstone beds that underlie this part of the East Midlands. The quarries are gone. The land has gone back to pasture.

The civil parish has been redrawn more than once. In December 1936 it absorbed the former parishes of Harston and Knipton, which were abolished. On 1 April 1965 it gained 146 acres from Woolsthorpe by Belvoir across the Lincolnshire border, and gave 9 acres back the other way - the kind of cartographic tidying that quietly happens to English parishes whenever someone with a map decides the old lines no longer match the lived geography. Today the parish encompasses three villages - Belvoir itself, Knipton and Harston - and shades into a cluster of nearby places that all share variations of the name: Woolsthorpe by Belvoir over the border in Lincolnshire, Redmile down on the vale floor, Croxton Kerrial on the road south. The nearest town is Grantham, 13 kilometres east, in Lincolnshire.

Walk through the village today and what you see is small and quiet - a handful of houses, the slope rising sharply to the castle, the green vale unrolling to the north. The Vale of Belvoir is famous for Stilton cheese, made in nearby villages, and for the hunt that bears the village name. The Belvoir Hunt has ridden these fields since the eighteenth century, in distinctive yellow coats rather than the more common red. The castle is open to visitors most of the year and runs an active calendar of events, from jousting tournaments to film locations - it has stood in for Windsor in The Crown and various other productions, its Gothic silhouette doing duty for many other royal homes. The village beneath does not advertise itself. It does not need to. The view that named it is still beautiful, and the locals still call it Beaver.