Blidworth

Tower clocks and the Black Bull

St Mary of the Purification has two clock faces on its tower, one facing east and one west, so there's no excuse for being late to anything on Main Street. The tower is the oldest part of the building, a 15th-century survivor; the rest was rebuilt in 1739 and again in 1839.

The Black Bull on Main Street is family-owned, with four B&B rooms and two rooms downstairs — one still a bar, the other a former lounge turned restaurant. CAMRA calls it simply a family-owned pub with B&B, which undersells the beer: up to five rotating guest ales, usually including Pheasantry and Stancill, three of them typically from Nottinghamshire breweries. The kitchen does good English cooking with something more adventurous alongside. Beer service starts at 10am, noon on Sundays.

Two more village locals

The Bird in Hand is the community local — dartboard, board games, quiz nights, live sport on the screens, and an "Order & Pay" app for anyone who can't be bothered walking to the bar. The beer garden has heaters and a covered area for wetter days.

Down in Blidworth Bottoms, the Fox & Hounds does a home-made steak and Stilton pie that one Tripadvisor reviewer called "really a bit special." Its Sunday roast runs to beef and chicken with big Yorkshire puddings — one Valentine's Day booking ran nearly four hours, staff rearranging tables to fit them in. It's open all day, every day.

Provisions and paths through the woods

For provisions, Maloneys Butchers on Mansfield Road does hand-crafted pies and British cold meats, and BJ Bakery is further along near the fire station. Mansfield, the nearest town, is five miles off — the 141 bus gets you there in twenty minutes, and the village sits just off the B6020.

Blidworth stands in what used to be Sherwood Forest, and the Robin Hood Way runs through the middle of it, passing through Blidworth Woods twice — pine and open heath, with waymarked trails from Longdale Lane. A linking path turns the two passes into a circular walk of about ten miles, and a shorter stage, roughly six miles, heads on to Papplewick via Newstead Abbey.

From Blideworde to the colliery

The Domesday Book records Blidworth — Blideworde — as five households with three ploughlands and a mill, held by the Archbishop of York. It stayed a farming village until the 19th and 20th centuries turned it industrial, and Blidworth Colliery went down in 1924, ran 742 yards deep, and at its busiest employed around 1,200 men before it closed in 1989; the winding wheels are preserved at the leisure centre now.

Robin Hood's Will Scarlet is traditionally buried in the churchyard, marked by a weathered stone fragment popularly called his monument, though historians note outlaws rarely got churchyard burials. Out in a field nearby stands the Druid Stone, a holed glacial boulder over 13 feet high with nothing to do with druids — that's a Victorian guess. Sick children were once passed through the hole in it for a cure.

Outlaws, the Druid Stone and Candlemas

Every Candlemas, St Mary's holds a ceremony that survives nowhere else in England: a baby boy born nearest to Christmas, to married, Christian parents in the village, is rocked in a flower-decorated cradle about 200 years old. It was banned around 1600, revived in 1842, lapsed again, and came back for good in 1922. Every rocked baby's name goes on a plaque at the back of the church — a small, growing list of who has passed through.