The Badger Box sits on Derby Road, close enough to Junction 27 of the M1 to reach in minutes, and the building itself has no connection to the pub it replaced — that one was pulled down once the new one was finished, and the car park now sits on its footprint. It's a Hungry Horse pub under the Greene King banner: all-day food, a beer garden where dogs are welcome.
Annesley sits between Hucknall and Kirkby-in-Ashfield, hills either side and forest at its back. The Misk Hills rise to the south, a sandstone plateau reaching 170 metres, with views towards Nottingham on a clear day. Annesley Forest and the wider Newstead & Annesley Country Park wrap round the village to the north, woodland and a lake linking through to the Newstead Abbey estate.
The Badger Box has been voted best Hungry Horse pub in its group, and long-time reviewers rate the staff and the value even when, as one puts it, the beer itself is "hit and miss." The cask ales are Cask Marque accredited with a five-star hygiene rating, CAMRA members get 10% off, and the guest ales rotate alongside Hardys & Hansons Bitter and Greene King Abbot. There's live music on Fridays, rock and roll bingo on Thursdays, a quiz on Saturdays.
Annesley doesn't have a shop of its own — the post office closed in 1977 and was never replaced. The nearest one is in Annesley Woodhouse; Kirkby-in-Ashfield is the town for anything beyond the pub.
Walkers are better served. The Annesley Hall Walk is a circular route of around 14km taking in the Misk Hills, Park Forest, the old church ruins, Annesley Hall itself, a long-vanished castle's earthworks, and on into Newstead village.
That old church is the thing to see if you only see one thing here. Annesley Old Church stands roofless on a mound above Annesley Hall and its park, a 14th-century building on a Norman site, Grade I listed and still on the Heritage at Risk register despite a restoration in 2011. Inside the ruined lady chapel are three sedilia and a piscina under tracery stonework. It stayed in occasional use until 1942.
Mary Chaworth was born at Annesley Hall in 1786, heiress to an estate her family had held since 1439, and Byron — who loved her as a teenager and never quite got over it — wrote of "Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren, where my thoughtless childhood stray'd." A Byron ancestor had already killed a Chaworth ancestor in a duel in 1765, over a dispute about game on adjoining land, and the rapier used is kept at the Hall. Mary married someone else in 1805; the bells they'd both listened to as teenagers were destroyed in a fire at the new parish church in 1907.
Annesley Colliery ran for 135 years before closing in 2000, and the pit village it left behind is a Conservation Area now. D.H. Lawrence used this stretch of country as the setting for his first novel, The White Peacock.
The old church ruins are also home to more than history — bats roost there, barn owls and green woodpeckers are seen regularly, and purple orchids come up through the graves, a reasonable sort of afterlife for a building nobody prays in any more.
