East Stoke

Fosse Way and the lost village pub

Red-roofed houses gather around a crossroads where the Fosse Way used to run straight through, splitting the village in two until the A46 bypass took the traffic half a mile east in 2012. The Trent sits about half a mile further on, through water meadows with great trees leaning over the churchyard wall.

There's no pub in East Stoke any more. The Pauncefote Arms on the Fosse Road ran as a village pub and an award-winning restaurant for more than twelve years before it closed. Nobody has reopened it.

The lost crossing and Elston's spa

The Bromley sits at Fiskerton on the far bank of the Trent, with a riverside garden. A ferry once crossed here on the old route between Newark and Nottingham, but the former ford has been lost. From East Stoke, the track leads towards the river, not across it; visiting the pub now means taking a road journey.

Bring any supplies you need for the walk. Nearby in Elston, Eden Hall occupies a Victorian mansion with an outdoor hydrotherapy pool, a saltwater vitality pool and a spa garden.

A small village and its battlefield trail

East Stoke parish recorded 175 residents in the 2021 census.

The main reason people come is the walk. The Battle of Stoke Field Trail starts on Trent Lane, diagonally opposite Eden Hall, and takes about ninety minutes over bridleway, footpath and pavement — unsuitable for buggies or people with limited mobility. Five panels trace the battle through the riverside landscape and past the Red Gutter. The route passes St Oswald's, which has battlefield displays inside, before reaching its final panel on Fosse Road. Laybys on Fosse Road are about 300 yards from the start; route 90 stops at East Stoke, Moor Lane.

St Oswald's and the Pauncefote legacy

St Oswald's is Grade II* listed, its squat west tower thirteenth-century, its four bells cast in 1591 by Henry II Oldfield of Nottingham. There's medieval glass in the chancel window and a piscina of similar age. The stones in the porch are grooved and worn, said locally to have been hollowed out by soldiers sharpening their swords after the battle.

Inside, a Union Jack that once flew over the British Embassy in Washington hangs near the tower. It draped the coffin of Julian, Lord Pauncefote, Britain's first ambassador to the United States, when his body was brought home in 1902; he's buried in the churchyard under a bronze angel. The oak pulpit was carved by Mrs Henry Bromley, of the family at Stoke Hall next door, now a wedding venue.

Three hours that settled a crown

The battle itself lasted about three hours. Henry VII's army, roughly 12,000 strong, met a Yorkist force built around German and Swiss mercenaries and Irish troops rallying behind a boy called Lambert Simnel, put forward as a rival king. Estimates of the dead run to several thousand. Simnel was pardoned and sent to work in the royal kitchens as a spit-turner. He was later promoted to falconer.