The Dog & Duck is, according to Wikipedia, the only social meeting place in Kings Clipstone. It's a large, open-plan gastropub on Main Road, with an all-day menu that runs to fish and chips at £17.95, vegan dishes marked VV (a pizza without cheese, a sweet potato and spinach pie) and gluten-free options. Doom Bar's on the pumps along with a changing guest ale. Reviews split: some found the Sunday lunch "excellent food, top notch waiting service, and a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere," others thought it "average at best, with big portions but lacking any seasoning or personality." Dogs aren't allowed in the main restaurant but are welcome in the beer garden, which looks out over meadowland that was once part of the Great Pond belonging to King John's Palace, a few hundred yards up the road.
That's the palace's only real trace at ground level in the village pub. The ruins themselves sit at Kings Clipstone, near Kings Clipstone Brewery, a micro-brewery on Mansfield Road turning out everything from dark Irish stout to pale ale since 2012.
Clipstone has a primary school, a library, a village hall and a football club, Clipstone Welfare F.C. For a bigger day out there's Vicar Water Country Park, 80 hectares of former colliery spoil tips turned into heathland, woodland and grassland around a 2.5-hectare lake. It has a children's play area with a giant zip wire, coarse fishing for carp, bream, roach and perch, a café and monthly ranger-led walks, plus a mining-heritage sculpture nicknamed the Golden Hand.
Sherwood Pines Forest Park adjoins the parish to the south — over 2,200 acres of walking and cycling, including the family-friendly Robin Hood Adventure Cycle Trail and the tougher, red-graded Outlaw Red. The Robin Hood Way and National Cycle Route 6 both pass through, and the Greenwood Walk heads west from the village to the main forest paths, about a fifteen-minute walk from the Major Oak.
All Saints Church keeps a fragment of a Saxon preaching cross in a glass case in the south transept. Only its west tower is medieval; the rest was rebuilt in 1739 and again in 1839. A second All Saints, over in New Clipstone, was built in 1928 for the colliery village, funded partly by the Bolsover Colliery Company and partly by the Duke of Portland.
The colliery itself closed in 2003, but its headstocks are still there — Grade II listed, 63 metres tall, built in 1953, and believed to be the tallest surviving headstocks in Europe.
Up at Kings Clipstone, a royal hunting lodge stood from at least 1164, visited over the centuries by eight kings despite being named for the one, John, who spent just nine days there. Edward I held a parliament on the site in 1290, on his way to Scotland, and the crowd was so large that his clerks had to lodge in Warsop because the palace couldn't fit them. The Domesday Book valued the whole settlement at two pounds.
Mansfield station is about four miles off, with buses 16 and 16a running from Mansfield Bus Station to Ward Road. The road in is the B6030, known locally as the Rat Hole. None of which stops the beer garden at the Dog & Duck from being a perfectly good place to sit on a Sunday, looking at the grass where a king once kept his fish.
