Caunton

A Gluten-Free Pub Reborn

The Caunton Beck occupies a building with roughly 700 years of history, and since reopening in May 2026 every dish on its menu has been gluten-free — the bread, the desserts, even the pasta. Co-owner Bonnie Turnbull was diagnosed with coeliac disease nine years ago and grew tired of, in her words, "having a salad or missing half the meal" wherever she went, so when she and her mother, Lorna Thompson, and stepfather Darren Sargent took the pub on, they rebuilt the kitchen around her. No deep fryer, no microwave, no cask ale for the time being. There is a courtyard for outdoor dining and a Sunday Roast menu that nobody in the building has to apologise for.

Getting there wasn't straightforward. The pub — formerly The Hole Arms, and empty for six years before Thompson's family bought it in 2023 — was badly flooded partway through the renovation, and much of the work had to start again from scratch. Thompson calls the reopening "a phoenix rising from the ashes."

The Traditional Counterpoint

A short walk along Main Street, opposite St Andrew's Church, The Plough Inn does the more traditional job. Fish and chips, Sunday roasts, pies, a decked beer garden with a grassed area for children, and a corner set aside for dogs, who are treated rather well — staff keep treats behind the bar for them. The current landlords, Paul and Marie, run quiz nights and live music.

There's no shop, butcher or bakery in the village. The two pubs are Caunton's food-and-drink offer, start to finish.

The Rose King's Caunton

St Andrew's itself has Norman pillars in its north arcade, a 13th-century font, and a tower heightened and hung with gargoyles in the 15th century. Samuel Reynolds Hole is buried in the churchyard. Hole served as curate and then vicar here through the mid-1800s and was invited, apparently at random and initially suspected of being an April Fool's joke, to judge a working men's rose show in Nottingham — despite owning no roses of his own at the time. He went on to grow upwards of 400 varieties at Caunton Manor, wrote "A Book about Roses" (the most popular of 31 Victorian books devoted to the subject), and became the first president of what became the Royal National Rose Society. Tennyson called him the Rose King.

Caunton Manor is now Caunton Manor Equestrian, run alongside international event rider Matthew Wright, with a mini-golf course next to the stables. Hole's rose garden became a riding school.

Mill, Beck and Ways Through the Village

Main Street also carries the brick tower of Caunton Mill, standing since before 1825 though it lost its cap and sails long ago, and the Beck itself, the stream the second pub takes its name from, which crosses both Ford Lane and Main Street on its way past the churchyard.

Walkers can pick up the Robin Hood Way on its approach into the village. A 12.3-mile circular route from Kirklington via Maplebeck and Winkburn brings you in past the grounds of Caunton Hall for a lunch stop, with a signposted warning about bloodhounds at Readyfield Farm — they're kept safely contained. The village sits on the A616, six miles from Newark-on-Trent, with Nottsbus On Demand and the Travel Wright 332 covering the gap for anyone without a car.

A League from Everywhere

As W. E. Doubleday wrote of Caunton in 1942, it "lay a league away from everywhere except Heaven." It still rather does.