The White Swan on the High Street has been pouring pints for more than 300 years, and today it belongs to three people: Kris McClean in the kitchen, Jordan Brady on the floor, Vick Angel McClean running events, with Katy behind the bar. The Sunday roasts are hand-carved, there's fish and chips and steak and ale pie on the regular menu, and two Sunday meals will set you back £30, dogs welcome in the beer garden. Saturday nights bring live music, plus the odd quiz or bingo night.
Walk down Bawtry Road and you reach the Angel Inn, which markets itself as one of the oldest coaching inns in the country, parts supposedly twelfth-century. Historic England's listing is less romantic and dates the standing building to the eighteenth. The mixed grill and fish and chips get singled out by reviewers; one warns that a small microwaved jacket potato cost over £10.
Further along the same road, the Red Hart has been in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide continuously since 2006, rotating up to four guest beers. One reviewer called the host "the heartbeat of the pub." The kitchen runs from hand-battered fish up to lobster thermidor, with hand-cut chips and a Sunday roast rated for generous portions.
Oliver's Bar on Bridge Street is a micropub pouring cask beers and the odd foreign import, run for the locals rather than at them.
Farmhouse Food and Wine on the High Street doubles as the village post office, open long hours daily, handling foreign currency, National Express tickets, parcel drop-off and vehicle tax alongside the groceries.
The village green sits at the centre of it all, with a 1935 red telephone box designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the same architect responsible for Battersea Power Station. It's Grade II listed now, which is a lot of protection for a phone box.
Behind the green stands the priory church of St Mary and St Martin, founded in 1088 by Roger de Busli. Pevsner wrote that "there is nothing like Blyth to get a feeling for early Norman grimness," and the nave is reckoned among the most important early Norman work in the country. A fifteenth-century Last Judgement wall painting was plastered over for centuries and only turned up again during restoration in 1987. The Domesday surveyors recorded eight households here in 1086 and didn't bother writing down a value at all.
Richard I licensed jousting tournaments here in 1194, one of only five grounds in England permitted them, and they carried on for centuries.
The Blyth Circular Walk is a flat two miles from the green, along a lane signed for Hodsock Priory, over a footbridge across the River Ryton and back by the fields. Hodsock itself, a mile south, opens its snowdrop gardens for about a month each February. The A1(M) passes junction 34 nearby, Retford's East Coast Main Line station is seven miles off, and Stagecoach buses run between Doncaster and Worksop roughly hourly on weekdays.
Blyth Cricket Club plays at Park Drive, two senior men's teams and a junior section it describes as open to anyone regardless of age, gender or ability — which, on a green with three surviving pubs and one very well-protected phone box, sounds about right.
