The Gardeners Inn on Awsworth Lane is the only pub left in Cossall, a family-run free house with a skittles team good enough to field sides in two divisions of the Border Skittles League. There's a pool table, live music some nights, and three changing guest ales including regular visits from Blue Monkey Brewery. Nottingham CAMRA registered it an Asset of Community Value in 2016, which is a formal way of saying the village would miss it.
Food runs Thursday to Saturday, noon to eight, with fish, pies, roast beef, steaks and salads, a "2 meals for £10" offer, and a Sunday Carvery from midday to four. Reviews are mixed on service, but one visitor came away pleasantly surprised by the size of the plates. A second pub once stood further along the same lane; it closed some years ago and has sat empty since. There are no shops in Cossall itself — it's a village, not a high street.
What it has instead is the canal. The Nottingham Canal runs along the valley below, dug in 1796 to carry coal out of the Erewash Valley on a level contour rather than through locks, disused as a waterway now and a nature reserve since 1977, home to dragonflies, damselflies and wildflowers along a towpath that's mostly flat compacted stone and buggy-friendly. The Erewash Valley Trail continues south with floodplain grassland good for water voles, and a circular walk links Strelley, Cossall and Trowell over 7.4 miles.
St Catherine's Church sits at the highest point of the village, its 13th-century core largely reworked in 1842. Inside is a 15th-century font, two bells in an old wooden frame — one inscribed 1733 — and an oak reredos carved by villagers rather than bought in. The east windows commemorate the Burrows family, whose daughter Louie was engaged to D.H. Lawrence; he used Cossall as the model for "Cossethay" in The Rainbow, and Church Cottage, where she lived, still carries a plaque. Her father carved woodwork inside the church too.
In the churchyard stands a Waterloo memorial, unveiled in 1877 on the battle's sixty-second anniversary, honouring three Cossall men who served together: Richard Waplington, a former colliery worker who died in the battle; Thomas Wheatley, who survived and went back to the forge at Babbington Colliery; and Corporal John Shaw of the 2nd Life Guards, a prizefighter the Nottingham Date Book of 1815 called "a tremendous pugilist... never beaten." At Waterloo he is said to have cut down as many as nine French cuirassiers before being shot from his horse and crawling to a farmhouse to die. Shaw and Waplington are still remembered locally as the Cossall Giants.
Behind the church, the Willoughby Almshouses have stood since 1685: eight dwellings and a taller former chapel, built on the site of the old Cossall Wood Hall, whose moat traces are all that remain of it. The original endowment paid each resident ten pounds a year, a new grey cloth gown every two years and five shillings of coal.
Ilkeston is a mile and a half away, with its own station on the Robin Hood Line, the Erewash Museum and the Scala Cinema. Wollaton Hall and its deer park are twenty minutes by car, and Cossall Road has four bus routes for anyone who'd rather not drive.
Thomas Wheatley came home from Waterloo and spent the rest of his working life at the forge, the church now listing his name alongside the other two.
