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.

Across the Trent and into the spa

The nearest pint is across the river at Fiskerton. The Bromley has a beer garden and takes its name from a Lord Bromley of Stoke Hall, who liked to hunt on that side of the water. You can walk there along the old Nottingham–Newark road, which follows the Fiskerton Ferry crossing — recorded in the Domesday Book, running until 1971 — where the rebel army also crossed the Trent, rather more urgently, in 1487.

There are no shops either. For groceries or anything else, Newark is five miles off. What East Stoke does have, just off the A46 slip road, is Eden Hall: a 65,000-square-foot Victorian mansion turned spa, with an outdoor hydrotherapy pool, a saltwater vitality pool, a fire pit for the evenings and two places to eat, Taste of Eden and the Vinery. It opens at 9am and, on Twilight Spa nights, doesn't close until 10pm.

A small village and its battlefield trail

The village itself numbered 175 people at the last census.

The main reason people come is the walk. The Battle of Stoke Field Trail starts on Trent Lane, opposite Eden Hall, and takes about ninety minutes on bridleway, footpath and pavement — not one for buggies. Five panels, put up in 2018, mark the ground: Burrand Furlong, where the rebels held the high point, and the Red Gutter, the wooded slope where they were driven down to the river meadows. Two rose beds, one white and one red, sit near the last panel. The trail ends at St Oswald's, which has its own panels inside. Laybys on the Fosse Road leave you about 300 yards from the start, and the 90 and 91 buses stop near Eden Hall.

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.