Stays near Bulkington

Bulkington is a large village near Bedworth in the Nuneaton and Bedworth district, about six miles north-east of Coventry and five miles south-west of Hinckley. Its ward had 6,080 residents at the 2021 census and it forms part of the Nuneaton urban area although its older ties are with Bedworth.

Domesday records it as Bochintone, the estate of a man called Bulca, among the lands of the Count of Meulan. The parish once held seven hamlets, among them Marston Jabbet, Ryton, Weston in Arden and Wolvershill; Ryton and Weston in Arden were absorbed as the village grew from the 1930s.

Farming came first. When the remaining common land was enclosed around 1770, ribbon weaving, spreading from Coventry and Bedworth, took over as the main living and the population nearly tripled. The trade collapsed in the 1860s after a treaty removed the duty on French silks; on 15 August 1861 six families left for Quebec, with 83 houses standing empty. Small ribbon factories carried on until the last, in Arden Road, closed in the early 1950s.

By the late thirteenth century the manor's centre had moved to Weston in Arden, where the sixteenth-century Weston Hall still stands as a hotel. Bulkington station on the Trent Valley line opened in 1847 and closed in 1931. Today the village is largely a commuter base for Coventry, Nuneaton, Bedworth, Hinckley and Leicester.

The novelist George Eliot, born nearby, knew the village well and is thought to have used it as Raveloe in Silas Marner of 1861. Her uncle and aunt are buried at the church of St James.

Sullivan Heights is about 5 miles by road from Bulkington, Stoke Lodge and Stoke House about 7 miles and Humber Hub about 7 miles. Sullivan Heights is the nearest base for families visiting the area or teams working between Coventry and Nuneaton.