Calverton

Framework Knitters and The Gleaners

Main Street in Calverton still carries the terraces built for framework knitters — narrow cottages with wide upper windows, put there to throw as much daylight as possible onto a knitting frame. More of them survive here than anywhere else in Nottinghamshire.

Two pubs anchor the village. The Gleaners Inn opened in 1876 under landlord William Wibberley and has been serving since — a former Home Ales house with an old photo of itself hanging inside. Tuesdays bring curry, rice, naan and a pint for £10; Sundays bring a roast; the sticky toffee pudding gets mentioned more than once in reviews. It's dog friendly, has a beer garden and two changing cask ales, and became a CAMRA Asset of Community Value in 2016. One TripAdvisor review is titled "Uncomfortable for non locals."

The Admiral Rodney and Village Shopping

The Admiral Rodney runs to tapas, pizza and loaded fries alongside what it calls "the Classics" — among them a Rodney Burger made with Derbyshire beef and caramelised onions. Thursdays are half-price pizza; the lunch special is £10; children eat for £1.99 after school, Monday to Friday. It pours Everards ales — Tiger, Sunchaser, Original, Beacon — has a patio garden and a function room called the Galleon, and hosts a Monday quiz and live music on Saturdays. A third pub, the Cherry Tree, closed in 2015 and has since been demolished.

Shopping runs to a Sainsbury's Local and a separate convenience store on St Wilfrid's Square. Nothing more elaborate has been recorded here.

Church Stones and Woodland Paths

St Wilfrid's Church is Grade II* and mostly 14th-century, with the nave and tower rebuilt in the 1760s. Nine carved sandstone panels in the clock chamber show the months' seasonal work, and the church appears in the Domesday survey — one of only 85 Nottinghamshire churches recorded in 1086, when Calverton was valued at £2 to the Archbishop of York.

Walks lead out along the Dover Beck to Oxton, Woodborough and Lambley, through Thorndale Plantation. An 8½-mile circuit from the library climbs to high ground with views back towards Dorket Head, and Papplewick Pumping Station, a preserved Victorian waterworks, is a mile and a half from the old colliery site.

William Lee and the Folk Museum

The village's best-known claim is that William Lee invented the stocking frame here in 1589, having grown tired of his sweetheart paying more attention to her knitting than to him. Historian Negley Harte has since shown the story is mostly legend: "There is no evidence that William Lee was Vicar of Calverton, nor indeed that William Lee was in Holy Orders at all." By 1832 around 300 stocking frames were working in the village.

The Folk Museum, in one of those cottages next to the Baptist Church, keeps an actual Victorian frameworker's knitting machine on display. It opens the last Sunday of the month, April to September, £2 for adults.

From Colliery Village to Commuter Settlement

Calverton's other life was as a colliery village — the pit opened in 1952, employed 1,600 people, and closed in 1999, after which the population kept climbing anyway. The trentbarton "calverton" bus and the Sky Blue Line run into Nottingham, seven miles south-west; the nearest station is at Lowdham, four miles off. None of it quite explains why a village this size still runs a Monday pub quiz and a museum that opens for two hours a month, worth timing a visit around.