The Lion by Olivers has a nine-hole crazy golf course in the garden, a table tennis table, and a Sunday lunch — three courses for £12.50 — with a choice of turkey, beef, lamb or nut roast. It used to be the White Lion, relaunching under new owners in 2022, and the rest of the menu runs to ham, egg and chips, sirloin steaks and vegetable stir fry, with cheesecake or brownies to finish. Reviewers call the food fresh and generously portioned, though service can take the best part of an hour — one visitor's ham, egg and chips arrived as a single thin slice of ham, an egg, and about eight chips.
Brinsley Lodge Inn, a Marston's pub on Mansfield Road, does its own butchery and serves the resulting steaks alongside fish and chips, gammon and Sunday roasts, with BOGOF Tuesdays and a curry night on Wednesdays. One reviewer called it a bland-looking building but said not to let that put you off. Dogs get the lower part of the bar, plus treats and water from the staff, and the beer garden serves Marston's Pedigree on cask.
The Go Between, a micropub on Moor Road, doesn't serve food, but sits next to a good fish and chip shop and carries three constantly-changing real ales plus real and boxed cider, with a Tuesday quiz night. The Durham Ox on High Street has an open fire, a skittles alley, and a field out back for children while the adults finish their drinks — visitors describe the food as delicious and the pub as pretty, which for a village pub is most of the job done.
Redgate Farm Shop at Coneygrey Farm covers the shopping, along with a post office on Brynsmoor Road.
St James the Great, on Church Lane, is a Grade II listed church built in 1837–38 from Bunter sandstone quarried at Mansfield, with two octagonal towers and lancet windows down the nave. Its wrought-iron chancel screen went up by public subscription in 1919, in memory of twelve village men killed in the First World War.
Walking starts at the picnic area south of the village, off the A608, where the old colliery site is now a conservation area with a memorial orchard and a wildlife pond. From there the Brinsley Steeple Chase, a 5.5-mile circular route, passes Coneygrey and Willey Wood farms, crosses the River Erewash into Derbyshire, and follows the line of the abandoned Cromford Canal back. Broxtowe Borough Council has also extended the D.H. Lawrence Trail to 6.2 miles, linking Brinsley to Eastwood.
Brinsley's other business was coal. The colliery opened around 1842, closed in 1934, and at its peak employed 361 men. Arthur John Lawrence was born here and went down the pit, as his own father had before him; his son D.H. Lawrence gave the colliery a thin disguise as "Beggarlee" in Sons and Lovers, and opened his short story "Odour of Chrysanthemums" with it directly: "The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides in the afternoon's stagnant light." Its tandem timber headstocks, the last of their kind in the country, were taken down in December 2023 after a survey found the timbers rotting; reinstallation began this spring. The Domesday survey valued Brinsley at six shillings and seven pence in 1066, falling to four shillings by 1086, when it was recorded as waste.
Trent Barton buses stop at Brinsley Headstocks and Broad Lane, the A608 runs through to Eastwood and the M1, and the nearest stations are at Langley Mill and Alfreton. The carnival, revived in 1960 by the village postmaster George Mills after lapsing through two world wars, still runs every Father's Day on the Recreation Ground, with decorated carts doing the rounds much as they did when it began as a way of paying hospital bills for injured miners.
