Awsworth

The Iron Giant

Fifteen slender iron piers carry the Bennerley Viaduct across the Erewash Valley at Awsworth, a quarter of a mile of wrought-iron lattice known locally as the Iron Giant. It's one of only two surviving wrought-iron railway viaducts in England, standing today largely by accident: too expensive to demolish once the trains stopped in the 1960s. It sat closed for decades until the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct reopened it to walkers and cyclists in January 2022, after £1.7m of restoration. A woodchip trail leads in from the village, and a circular walk taking in the viaduct, canal towpath and ironwork takes about two hours.

D.H. Lawrence, who grew up in the Erewash Valley, put it in Sons and Lovers: "She's over the viaduct. You'll just do it."

Awsworth's Village Pubs

The village runs to three pubs. The Gate Inn, a red-brick three-storey building where Main Street becomes Awsworth Lane, reopened as a free house in December 2010 and has since picked up Nottingham CAMRA's Pub of Excellence and LocAle Pub of the Year awards. It keeps seven changing real ales, real cider on draught and gluten-free ales, with a rear courtyard, sun terrace and front patio. Tuesday is pie and peas day; it has a skittle alley, a real fire, and is home to the Border Morris dancers.

The Crown Inn, on Croft Crescent, began as a dwellinghouse around 1860 and was, until recent boundary changes, the only pub actually inside Awsworth — a fixture, by one account, "for over 150 years." It has a rare surviving skittle alley in a separate building, a pool table and dart board; reviewers rate the food good value. It also hosted Coroner's Inquests into deaths at the nearby Cossall Colliery between 1883 and 1888: William Robinson, 55, killed by a fall of roof; George Henry Statham, 17, run over by tubs; and William Green, 15, and William Horton, 14, killed together by a fall in a roadway.

Food and Railway Connections

The Hogs Head Hotel on Awsworth Lane has twelve en-suite rooms and serves English traditional food with the odd Continental dish. The site was a farm, then a piggery, then a family home after the Hogg family bought it in 1974, with a haulage business until it became a hotel in 1986. A central stone section is said to be over 500 years old, from an earlier coaching operation.

Awsworth lost its own railway station in 1964. The nearest one now is Ilkeston, about a mile from the viaduct, reopened in 2017, and the Trent Barton 27 bus runs through the village between Kimberley and Ilkeston.

Village Provisions and Origins

For groceries there's a NISA, trading out of the old Co-operative building on Main Street, put up in 1903. No butcher, baker or deli operates in the village.

St Peter's, the parish church, wasn't built until 1746 — before that, Awsworth's churchgoers walked to Nuthall. The Domesday Book lists Awsworth twice, under two different lords, and both entries are marked simply "waste."

Mining Memory and Recreation

On the roundabout at the north end of Shilo Way sit retired colliery tub wagons, a nod to the pits, ironworks and blast furnaces that once employed the village. Locals call it Tub Island. Down at the Shiloh recreation ground, a wheelchair-accessible trampoline and a five-section trim trail went in this year, paid for by a £20,000 government grant.