Do you have the courage to join the Paranormal Eye team on an exclusive overnight ghost hunt? The Six Hills Hotel is a personal favourite of the group, with a fascinating history dating back centuries and a reputation for being haunted by many ghosts. During the ghost hunt, you'll have access to hidden rooms no longer available to the general public. However, be prepared to face your fears; many have reported eerie experiences in this old coaching inn. Guests have witnessed doors opening by themselves, dark ghostly shadows in the corridors, loud thuds and bangs from locked-off areas, and strange lights floating through the air. The disused bar area is particularly daunting, with many guests seeing dark shadows crawling across the ceilings. Are you ready to experience a ghost hunt like no other at The Six Hills Hotel?

History Of The Six Hills Hotel 

At Six Hills, the Roman Fosse Way crosses a minor Roman road from the ironstone ridge above Long Clawson to the River Soar at Barrow. The site was probably the meeting place for the Anglo-Saxon administrative 'moots'. The Roman roads remained in use for many centuries as drovers' roads, as is confirmed by the original name of the inn there – The Durham Ox – which is frequently associated with drovers' resting places.

In 2004 two influential books were published that bring together specialist knowledge of local landscapes. One is devoted to Leicestershire and the other to the Trent Valley. Most of the Wolds’ villages fall on the edge of Leicestershire, and the others in Nottinghamshire are above the Trent valley. This means that both books have something to say about the Wolds, although the main emphasis is on a broader area.

Twenty years ago, archaeological knowledge about Leicestershire and the Trent valley landscapes was, at best, patchy. Since then, the activities of numerous amateurs plus developer-funded excavations by professional archaeologists have provided considerably more information. Now it is possible to assess our predecessors right back to the Palaeolithic, more than 250,000 years ago. By the time of the Neolithic and early farming, about 4,000 years ago, sufficient evidence suggests that all parts of Leicestershire were being exploited. A hand axe found in a field near Wymeswold forms part of that pattern of evidence. The Trent valley was decidedly busy in the Neolithic, with remains ranging from fish weirs to ritual sites with a sophistication matching henges and other prehistoric earthworks surviving more visibly in Derbyshire or Wiltshire.

The Wolds were regionally crucial in the Iron Age as a 'great sacred grove' by the Fosse Way on the eastern extremity of what Wymeswold parish gave its name to the small Roman town of Vernemetum. Further east, near Goadby Marwood, there was extensive ironworking in both Iron Age and Roman times, and this iron may have been sold at Vernemetum to traders using the Fosse Way. The proximity of Vernemetum would have influenced farming on the Wolds during the Roman era, and this is reflected in the Roman farmsteads discovered by fieldwalking in and around Wymeswold.

Vernemetum was one of a regularly-spaced network of towns in Roman Leicestershire. Just outside the Wolds, another town straddling both banks of the River Soar at Barrow would have been an important trading place. This is confirmed by the Roman road, which runs from Barrow, over the Wolds between Seagrave and Burton, crossing the Fosse Way at Six Hills, then continuing along the ironstone ridge above the Trent valley in the general direction of the Roman town near Goadby Marwood.

After the Romans left, the Wolds area seems to have been less heavily farmed, perhaps reverting to scrubby woodland used for grazing pigs, geese or other livestock. The Trent valley and south Leicestershire suggest fewer farmsteads in the early Anglo-Saxon era (fifth to seventh centuries AD) than in the preceding Roman period. Those that remained were on the soils most suitable for arable farming. This infers that the Wolds, predominately heavy boulder clays, were not as heavily farmed as in Roman times.

However, the Wymeswold-Vernemetum area seems to have retained importance well into the Anglo-Saxon era, as high-status brooches from about the eighth century were found by Mr Pat Gratton just to the east of the village some years ago (one of these is now on display in Charnwood Museum, Loughborough) together with Anglo-Saxon strap ends found by another metal detector user on the Vernemetum site. Such strap ends are used to decorate the lots of bindings for burial shrouds, so they are evidence for Christian burials and strongly suggest that an early Anglo-Saxon church or 'minster' was built on the site of the Iron Age 'great sacred grove'. This Christian cemetery is the successor to the large pagan Anglo-Saxon cemetery just to the north, partly excavated before the bridge was built over the A46 in the 1960s.

The Roman town at Barrow continued as an important Anglo-Saxon settlement. The evidence for this is a substantial scatter of pottery shards. Such quantities of pottery from this time are rare and, when excavated (as at Eye Kettleby near Melton Mowbray in the 1990s), are associated with significant settlements. Waterborne transport was crucially important in Roman and Anglo-Saxon times, so the ability to load produce onto vessels which could readily travel into the Trent valley and go upstream to the various other tributaries or downstream towards the Humber and the North Sea would make Barrow a handy and lucrative trading place. Next time you hire a rowing boat from the pub at Barrow, try to imagine some shallow-drafted Roman or Saxon trading boats moored up to offload salt or foreign produce and return with locally-produced ironwork dairy crop or livestock. Yes, animals were taken on such a small craft, with their feet hobbled together.

A similar continuity from the Roman occupation into the Anglo-Saxon era has also been discerned at Stanford on Soar, where the church seems to be on the site of a Roman villa. Reusing the remains of Roman buildings for early churches is relatively common; similar evidence has been found at Southwell Minster and, nearer to the Wolds, at Flawford (Notts) and Ab Kettleby (Leics). Likewise, the earliest version of St Nicholas church in Leicester incorporated parts of the Roman baths, perhaps including the claim that survives as Jewry Wall