Bingham

Market Morning and The Wheatsheaf

Thursday mornings the traders set up around the Butter Cross on Market Place, selling food, giftware, clothing and haberdashery, much as they have since a market charter was granted here in 1341. The stalls go up around a monument that isn't actually a cross — it's a Victorian memorial — and the pub facing it, the Wetherspoon-run Butter Cross, stands on the site of the old Crown Inn.

The Wheatsheaf, on Long Acre, is a Grade II listed building dating to 1779, with flagstone floors, wooden beams and open fireplaces, and it was named Pub of the Year by the Vale of Belvoir branch of CAMRA. Ten handpumps rotate through cask ales and ciders, including Burton Bridge's "'L' of a Beer". Food runs from ham hock terrine to crispy cod cheeks to a bean burger one vegetarian diner called "a real treat", with a chocolate brownie cheesecake to finish. The general manager, Niall, says the place is "filled with passionate people that love what they do."

A Chapel Pub and a Butcher's-shop Café

The Horse & Plough used to be a chapel, bought by Nottingham's Castle Rock brewery in 2015. It runs Spanish tapas evenings with a chef named Don Francisco alongside Harvest Pale on permanently, and dogs get treats and water bowls behind the bar.

Butler's Coffee House occupies a Grade II listed former butcher's shop, keeping the original meat hooks on the beams and the marble slab the butcher once displayed his cuts on — coffee gets served on it now. Melanie and Richard Seaman, who also run The Chestnut in Radcliffe-on-Trent, serve locally roasted Outpost coffee with homemade cakes and savoury platters.

Rail, Roman Roads and Parish History

Bingham railway station sits on the Poacher Line, with trains to Nottingham taking around 13 to 16 minutes and onward connections to Grantham and Skegness. By road you're on the A52 close to its junction with the A46 — the old Fosse Way, which still carries traffic through the roundabout built in 1968 over the Roman posting station of Margidunum, where excavations between 1910 and 1936 turned up underfloor heating, window glass and enough pottery to fill a room at Nottingham University.

The parish church, St Mary and All Saints, is Grade I listed with eight bells, restored in the 1840s by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Domesday valued the whole manor at £10, held by Roger of Bully, worked by four of the lord's plough teams and twelve and a half belonging to the men of the village. In 1643 seven hundred Roundhead troops, driven off from Wiverton Hall, took shelter here.

The Old Railway to the Vale

Bingham Linear Park follows the old Bingham–Barnstone railway line out to the River Smite, flat and easy walking with a guided ramble on the third Sunday of each month. Aslockton, where Thomas Cranmer was born, is a couple of miles east along the Cranmer Walk, and Colston Bassett's dairy — one of the last to hand-ladle its Stilton curd rather than machine it — is a short drive into the Vale.

John Hassall's Butter Cross

The Butter Cross itself was paid for by public subscription in 1861, in memory of a land agent called John Hassall, who died having "endeared himself to the people of Bingham by his charity and concern for their welfare." For years afterwards, people who had known him decorated its eight pillars every spring with garlands of primroses.