Behind the bar at The Brewers Arms is a large collection of water jugs, kept for spirits rather than water, the sort of detail you only notice once someone points it out. The pub is an 18th-century building on Town Street, a few yards from the Chesterfield Canal, close enough to watch narrowboats go by from the patio garden while you drink. Richard and Gina Hadfield run it, closed Mondays except bank holidays, dogs welcome, with two changing real ales, typically Adnams Southwold Bitter and Timothy Taylor Landlord.
Two more pubs sit further along Town Street. The Blacksmiths reopened in July 2024 under new management, with three letting rooms upstairs, a real fire, and a garden that gets praised almost as often as the food; guest ales including Welbeck Abbey rotate alongside a permanent Timothy Taylor Landlord, and dogs are allowed until 5.30pm. The Sun Inn, on the corner of Willingham Road, has an open fire pit in its garden and small plates alongside hearty mains — "a lovely welcoming pub with lovely food and a kind boss and workers," in one reviewer's words.
Clayworth doesn't have a shop of its own. What it has instead is the canal.
The Chesterfield Canal opened in 1777 and curls round the village on its way from Chesterfield to West Stockwith, part of a 46-mile route known as the Cuckoo Way. A signposted circular walk of about two and a half miles starts at Clayworth Top Bridge, follows the towpath past Otter's Bridge to Gray's Bridge, and takes in moored narrowboats, ducks and moorhen. A shorter version, closer to an hour, loops the village and takes in the church too.
The church is St Peter's, Grade I listed, Norman in origin with later medieval additions. Pevsner found the 13th-century nave arcades "very weird" — the piers and arches don't appear to relate to each other, a mismatch nobody has fully explained.
The real reason to go inside is the chancel, where all four walls are covered in murals painted in 1904-05 by Phoebe Anna Traquair, Scotland's first professional female artist — one of only two murals by her in England, and the largest single artwork in the east of England. Lady D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne commissioned it to mark her son Captain Joseph Laycock's safe return from the Boer War; the scenes include the Annunciation, the Last Supper and Christ in Gethsemane, thick with gilding.
The Domesday surveyors valued the whole place at £1 6s 2d.
Clayworth's other claim to fame is a piece of paper. The Rector's Book, 62 parchment leaves kept by Rev. William Sampson between 1676 and 1701, includes two full household listings taken twelve years apart, showing that something like half the village had moved on in that time — figures the historian Peter Laslett later used in "The World We Have Lost," his 1965 study of pre-industrial England.
Retford, with the nearest railway station, is six miles away, and the 97 bus runs to Gainsborough roughly every two hours, Monday to Saturday. Mattersey Priory, a ruined Gilbertine priory on the River Idle, is a short drive, and Wiseton, the next village along, has its own hall — once home to the Laycock family, the same family commemorated in the murals at St Peter's.
Back at the Brewers Arms, none of that troubles the dogs on the patio. They're watching the water for boats.
