Eakring

A tearoom, but no open pub

At The Coach House on Main Street, the Daffodil Tearoom does a pork cob and homemade granola for breakfast, plus the odd cocktail night. It is, at the moment, the only place in Eakring serving anything.

The Savile Arms, on Bilsthorpe Road, isn't. Its untouched interior — tap room, snug-lobby, red-tiled pool room — earns the 400-year-old pub a place on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. It closed before mid-2023, when a visitor found weeds round the door and a notice asking for new management, and by December was recorded as "closed, future uncertain." Eakring has no open pub.

From oak-circle name to walking country

The name is older than either of them: Old Norse, eik-hringr, "the circle of oak trees." Eakring sits between the A617 and A616, about 12 miles from Newark. Fiskerton, on the Nottingham–Lincoln line, is the nearest station; Nottsbus On Demand offers a bookable door-to-door service.

What the village does have is walking. The Robin Hood Way, a 104-mile path, runs straight through, climbing past the old windmill — five storeys of brick, sail-less since 1912, now a house. South of the village, the Dukes Wood Nature Trail crosses the old oilfield past restored pump jacks. Eakring Flash draws birdwatchers, and Eakring Meadows is among the county's best surviving neutral grasslands.

Mompesson and the Pulpit Ash

St Andrew's Church has a 13th-century tower base and a font dated 1674. By the 1670s the church was dangerously dilapidated; the new rector, William Mompesson, restored it. Mompesson had been rector of Eyam, Derbyshire, through the Great Plague of 1665–66 — his own wife died in the outbreak he helped contain by sealing the village off — and stayed at Eakring 39 years, from 1670. Tradition says wary villagers wouldn't let him preach inside the church, so he preached instead under an ash tree at the village edge, afterwards the Pulpit Ash, marked since 1893 by a stone cross: "Near this spot stood Pulpit Ash where Mompesson preached on coming to Eakring as Rector in 1670 AD after leaving Eyam in Derbys which had been decimated by the plague."

The secret oilfield

Eakring's other secret took longer to get out. In the late 1930s, geologists found oil beneath the village using old colliery borehole records. By 1943, 42 American drilling roughnecks, most from Oklahoma, sailed on the converted liner Queen Elizabeth and were billeted at Kelham Hall, a Gothic Revival theological college nearby — locals reportedly assumed the unexplained American presence meant a Western was being filmed. Over the following year they drilled 106 wells, pushing output from around 300 barrels a day to over 3,000. It stayed classified for decades, revealed only in Guy and Grace Steele Woodward's 1973 book The Secret of Sherwood Forest. The bronze Oil Patch Warrior statue has since moved to Rufford Abbey after theft threats, and the site itself is now a nature reserve, open at all times.

Lizzie Dripping's village

The children's author Helen Cresswell lived at Old Church Farm and based her BBC series Lizzie Dripping on the village, insisting filming happen there rather than on a set. The character came from something she overheard her neighbour, Mary Stokes, say to her daughter: "You're a right Lizzie Dripping, you are." The story's witch, who knits on a flat gravestone, was based on one that's still there, in the churchyard next to the house where Cresswell lived, and died.