A lift takes you to the top of the Bestwood Winding Engine House, a four-storey brick tower built in 1873 in a stern Italian Gothic style, and you come back down the stairs while a volunteer tells you how the mine worked. Inside are two single-cylinder vertical winding engines, still in the building they were installed in, which Historic England records as the only surviving example of its kind left in its original location anywhere in Great Britain. Tours are free, run by volunteers most Saturdays and bank holidays, 10am to noon.
The pub in the village is the Welfare, and it is not trying to be anything other than what it says. It grew out of the old Miners' Welfare Institute, and it is still run by the Bestwood Miners' Welfare Charity rather than a brewery. Two changing cask ales, a beer garden, dogs on leads. The function room, the Velvet Room, gets booked for weddings and birthdays, and on other nights hosts the Bestwood Welfare Black Diamonds Brass Band, running since 1946 and named for coal that was supposed to shine like a diamond once it was washed.
For food and a sit-down, there's Dynamo House, a community café inside Bestwood Country Park run by volunteers from the Friends of the park. It opens Saturday mornings, 9.30 till 12.30, for tea, coffee and home-made cakes, and all the profits go back into the park. There's a parkrun too, free and timed, 9am on Saturdays, running since 2017.
The park itself is 650 acres of restored colliery tip and old parkland — Mill Lakes for the water birds, wildflower meadows, an adventure playground, and Big Wood, described by the county council's own walking guide as "a magnificent area of mature woodland," which for once undersells it. The Robin Hood Way runs through on its way to Papplewick Moor, climbing to the old pit-tip summit for views toward Newstead Abbey. National Cycle Route 6 also passes through.
Before it was a colliery village, Bestwood was royal hunting ground, and the story that survives is Nell Gwyn's. Charles II is supposed to have promised her all the land she could ride around before breakfast, so she set off at dawn dropping handkerchiefs to mark the boundary and was back before the King's guests were up. He kept the promise, and later left the estate to their son, the first Duke of St Albans. It never made it into the Domesday Book — it was forest then, hunted by Edward I, Edward III and Richard III on his way to Bosworth.
The colliery came in 1875, and the terraces built for the workforce on Park Road, St Albans Road and The Square are now a conservation area. It closed in 1967. St Mark's Church went up soon after, in 1886, with a fireplace inside carrying the inscription "WALK AS CHILDREN OF LIGHT," which has outlasted most of the opinions in the village.
Hucknall station is 1.4 miles off, on the Robin Hood Line, and the trent barton 141 stops in the village on its way from Nottingham to Mansfield. On a Saturday morning, though, most people here are already where they want to be — queuing at Dynamo House for a slice of cake before the tea runs low.
