Qualla: Melton Mowbray

Melton Mowbray: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk into a Melton Mowbray bakery and the pies sit in their cases like small, golden monuments. The pastry is hand-raised around a wooden dolly, so the walls bow gently outward. Inside is chopped pork, not minced, cured by salt rather than nitrites, sealed under a layer of clear jelly poured warm and set cold. Only pies made within a designated zone around this Leicestershire market town are allowed to call themselves Melton Mowbray, by order of the European Union since April 2008. The town has spent the better part of two centuries turning the leftover whey of cheesemaking into something the rest of Britain decided was worth defending in court.

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Melton Mowbray: A Market Older Than the Conquest

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tuesday has been market day in Melton since 1324, when royal approval first formalised what had already been happening for centuries. The Domesday Book of 1086 records Melton as the only market in Leicestershire, a thriving settlement of around 200 souls with weekly trading, two ...

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Melton Mowbray: Whey, Pork, and Protected Status

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pies came from the cheese. Stilton, despite the name, was made in significant quantities around Melton long before the Cambridgeshire village it sold from gave the cheese its identity. The local Tuxford & Tebbutt creamery was for many years one of only six dairies licensed to...

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Melton Mowbray: The Fox-Hunting Capital

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the late eighteenth century into the twentieth, Melton was where wealthy men came to ride to hounds. The Quorn, the Cottesmore, and the Belvoir hunts all meet within a horse's hack of the town, and the surrounding countryside, neither too steep nor too flat, became Britain's...

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Melton Mowbray: Civil War and Cold War

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

During the English Civil War, Melton held for Parliament under a Colonel Rossiter. In November 1643, Royalists caught the garrison unawares and rode off with prisoners and booty. In February 1645, Sir Marmaduke Langdale brought 1,500 Royalist troops back through the town and kill...

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Melton Mowbray: A Country Town That Knows What It Is

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

St Mary's Church, dating mainly from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, has been called one of the finest parish churches in Leicestershire, and it dominates the skyline as you approach from any direction. Below it, the Anne of Cleves House in Burton Street is a fourteenth-ce...

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