East Bridgford

Saxon Stone and Ridge Views

St Peter's church on Main Street has a credence table with an unusual base: a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon cross, worked into the stonework and rediscovered during restoration. Foundations of an even older Saxon church, only eight feet wide, were found under the chancel, along with reddened stone that suggests the building was burned by Danish raiders in the ninth century and rebuilt over the next two centuries.

You're on a ridge above the Trent here, and it shows. White's 1853 Directory called East Bridgford "a large and well built village, on the summit of a precipitous bank, that rises on the south side of the Trent, opposite Gunthorpe Ferry," and the description still holds. Walk to the eastern edge of the village and the view opens over the Vale of Belvoir; walk north and you're looking down over the Trent floodplain instead.

The Royal Oak and the Lost Reindeer

The Royal Oak, on Main Street, is close to the church. It's known locally for its Sunday roasts — roast potatoes, home-made Yorkshire pudding, fresh veg — run by the current landlords, Mark and Sarah, and rated the best restaurant in the village on Tripadvisor. There's a large beer garden, dogs are welcome, and food is served Wednesday to Sunday; Monday and Tuesday it's drinks only. One reviewer noted the drinks are "quite expensive for the area."

The village used to have a second pub. The Reindeer Inn, on Kneeton Road, was remembered for cinema nights and river views before it closed for good in September 2015.

Trent Walks and Ancient Brugeford

Kneeton Road leads out toward the river, and a footpath opposite Lammas Lane crosses the fields and drops down to the Trent. The fuller circular walk to Kneeton and back runs about nine kilometres, crossing seven stiles and climbing back up the ridge at the end. Shorter and flatter is the route to Gunthorpe, where the bridge — a 1927 reinforced-concrete arch that replaced an earlier bridge and, before that, a ferry — crosses to a lock and weir, good for picnics and fishing. The nearest station is at Bingham, about three miles off, and the 354 and Rushcliffe Villager buses both run through the village.

The village sits beside Margidunum, a Roman staging post on the Fosse Way that grew into a defended settlement of six ditches and a stone wall before it was abandoned around 500 AD. Domesday recorded it as Brugeford: fifteen villagers, twenty freemen, three smallholders and a priest, valued at five pounds to its lord, Roger de Bully.

Regicide and the Sunday Roast

Francis Hacker, born here, escorted Charles I to his execution and signed the death warrant, and was hanged for it in 1660. The village seems to have made its peace with this, or forgotten it, which comes to much the same thing on a Sunday afternoon at the Royal Oak, when nobody's discussing regicide, just whether to have the pie or the roast.