The village stocks are still on the green, with a whipping post fitted with two pairs of iron manacles, and nobody has needed either for the best part of two centuries. They sit on the Large Common, which at sixteen and a half acres is reckoned the largest village green in Nottinghamshire and quite possibly in England.
There's a second green too, the smaller Little Green, twenty-seven acres of open grass between them, ringed by the village's houses and church. Landowners enclosed the surrounding fields in 1598 but left the greens open, so cottagers could graze cattle, geese and horses — a right still exercised today.
The Royal Oak sits on the Large Common and is the only pub Car Colston has ever had — no record of a lost second pub, shop or post office. Richard and Vicky run it, both members of the British Institute of Innkeeping; Vicky cooks, Richard looks after the ales. The building is over two hundred years old, and local tradition holds it started life as a hosiery factory — the vaulted brick ceiling above the bar is the evidence usually offered.
The beer is Cask Marque five-star rated, mostly Marston's, with Wainwright Gold and Eagle Bombardier among the named regulars. It's won the Vale of Belvoir & Nottinghamshire CAMRA Pub of the Year three times — 2021, 2020 and 2009. Dog friendly, with a beer garden, a skittle alley, a separate function room, and a small campsite about five minutes away. TripAdvisor reviewers describe the food as "wholesome, well cooked, top quality, flavoursome."
There is no shop in the village. Nearest shopping, and the nearest railway station, is Bingham, three miles south, with trains roughly every hour or two toward Nottingham, Grantham and Skegness. The village sits just off the A46, the old Fosse Way, with around seven buses a day to Nottingham and Newark.
Walking routes head out in most directions: a circular through Scarrington and Screveton passes the Horseshoe Tower, and a longer route from East Bridgford crosses arable fields to the Large Green, past two windmills and a bug hotel.
St Mary's Church is Grade I listed, with a Norman font carved from a single block of sandstone around 1130 and a chancel sedilia carved with small, humorous faces and a ram's head, plus a stained glass window by Charles Kempe, a memorial to Henry Girardot.
Robert Thoroton is buried here — physician, magistrate, and Nottinghamshire's first county historian, whose Antiquities of Nottinghamshire took ten years to research and was published in 1677, the year before he died. He lived at the Old Hall on the green. His carved coffin, prepared six years before his death, was unearthed during chancel repairs in 1845, and for a time his skull sat in a village shop window as a curiosity before proper reburial was arranged.
The parish register also has a grimmer entry, from 1604: "The plague began with George Caunt... 49 others died and were buried 15 August 1604" — roughly a fifth of the village.
Car Colston Cricket Club has played on the common every Sunday through summer since 1864. Its Presidents' Day fixture against Flintham, for the John Gilbert Trophy, draws around 250 people for a lunch under a marquee on the green where, on any other Sunday, someone's horse might be grazing.
