Cuckney

Ale, roasts and the village pub

The Greendale Oak sits on Budby Road with a doggy friendly area built into the floor plan, alongside the restaurant, the snug, the bar and a garden the pub itself calls a "superb outside area." Muddy boots are welcome. Up to seven real ales are usually on, two regulars from Everards — Sunchaser and Tiger — plus five rotating guests that have recently included Ashover Littlemoor Citra and Castle Rock Elsie Mo, and real cider besides.

Food runs noon to nine most days, noon to seven on Sundays, when the roasts are the reason people come back. Reviewers mention the venison burger and the steak pie. Thursday is fish market night, Wednesday is the quiz.

One pub, one bus and a trail to Welbeck

One TripAdvisor regular has been coming "for over 40 years," and calls it "a little gem" — in a village with exactly one pub, it does a lot of work. The Stagecoach 209 stops right outside on Budby Road, running between Edwinstowe and Worksop.

There's no shop in Cuckney itself, which is the honest gap in an otherwise well-fed village. What there is instead is a walk: the Water Meadows trail out of Welbeck Estate crosses fields and a kissing gate past Lady Margaret Hall and comes out at the Greendale Oak, and along the way sits the Welbeck Farm Shop and the Harley Café, open Tuesday to Sunday.

Castle, church and the Hatfield mystery

St Mary's Church stands inside what used to be the bailey of Cuckney Castle, a motte-and-bailey fortress built by Thomas de Cuckney, who also founded Welbeck Abbey in 1140. The castle was pulled down after the civil war of Stephen's reign known as the Anarchy; the motte and its ditch are still there at the churchyard edge, scheduled since 1953. Inside the church, a worn black marble slab is reputed to be the tomb of Robert Pierrepont, 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. Pevsner catalogued the building for his Nottinghamshire volume, and its painted decoration has been described as deserving to be more widely known.

In 1951, workmen shoring up the nave columns against mining subsidence dug into the floor and found around 200 human skeletons. Professor Maurice Barley, who recorded the find, described the remains as lying "very close, indeed jostled with each other in the trenches." The area was once known as Hatfield, and the tradition holds that this is where King Edwin of Northumbria fell in 632, his body later carried to Whitby. The Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society is still out there with ground-penetrating radar trying to prove it. Nobody currently knows where the reinterred remains are.

Robin Hood Way and the road in

The Robin Hood Way loops through here too, four miles or nine depending on ambition, past the Welbeck deer park where you can watch white deer graze, on to Holbeck and its "pretty church," and eventually to Creswell Crags. Most people arrive along Cuckney Hill on the A60, with Worksop and its station five and a half miles to the south-west.

The Poulter, millpond and watermill school

Closer to home, the millpond on the River Poulter has swans and coot, reached down School Lane past the primary school — itself a converted 1846 watermill, still teaching around 140 children a short walk from the water.