Edwinstowe

High Street Pubs and the Forest Edge

The Royal Oak serves a double smash burger with American cheese, gem lettuce, tomato, red onion, dill pickles, house burger sauce, a Welbeck brioche bun and fries, plus a Royal Oak burger of three 3oz patties with sticky short rib, apple and chorizo jam, smoked bacon, and truffle and parmesan fries. The High Street pub also serves beer-battered haddock and chips, welcomes dogs in the bar and carries up to four real ales, including Everards Tiger; quiz nights and live music add to the village-pub feel.

Edwinstowe has just over five thousand people on the northern edge of Sherwood Forest. Birklands, the ancient oak woodland, begins where the houses thin out, and a Robin Hood and Maid Marian statue stands on the High Street. The forest lies just north of the village; village life continues around it.

Edwinstowe’s High Street has several traditional pubs. The Black Swan has period décor, local historic photographs, three letting rooms and Timothy Taylor Boltmaker alongside Pheasantry ales. Further along the High Street, the Dukeries Lodge has seventeen guest rooms, with accommodation named Duke of Portland, Duke of Norfolk and Duke of Newcastle. It previously traded as Ma Hubbards; the historic Dukeries Hotel was a coaching-era refreshment stop recorded in the 1890s.

Horse-drawn excursions carried visitors from Edwinstowe station to local beauty spots. In 1897, local carriage owners formed the Edwinstowe Carriage Owners’ Association to take passengers through the Dukeries, stopping at the Jug and Glass or Dukeries Hotel before visiting the Major Oak. In 1898, the Duke of Portland warned that he would close his estate drives to the public if operators continued overloading their carriages.

Dining, Craft and St Mary's

Forest Lodge is a family-run free house, hotel and restaurant in an eighteenth-century building, with 4-star AA-rated rooms, a real fire and a separate bar. Its menu uses locally sourced ingredients and includes House of Bukhara Indian dishes; dogs are welcome in the top bar, while the bar carries beer from Welbeck Abbey Brewery and Timothy Taylor Landlord.

The Lansbury, formerly Launay's, is a restaurant and bar in a restored sixteenth-century cottage with seasonal menus and locally sourced food.

The Sherwood Forest Art & Craft Centre is a courtyard of independent studios and shops on the village edge. Its studios cover chocolate, jewellery, gemstones and fossils, woodwork, leather goods, soaps and candles, pens, art and dolls'-house furniture. An on-site café serves cooked meals, snacks and homemade cakes.

St Mary’s Church is Grade I listed and the only Grade I building among the village’s seven listed structures. Its core is twelfth-century, with a stone chancel rebuilt around 1175; local tradition links that work to penance imposed on Henry II after Thomas Becket’s murder. A south-aisle chantry was added in the 1340s by Henry de Edenstowe, a canon of Southwell and Lincoln, and the chancel was rebuilt again in 1432 on the same foundations. The fifteenth-century broach spire has been rebuilt more than once after lightning strikes.

Church Treasures and Edwin's Resting Place

Inside, St Mary's has an octagonal stone font and a painted chancel screen depicting King Edwin; the screen was installed in 1938. In 1952-53 the building was underpinned onto a concrete raft to counter subsidence from coal mining beneath the village. Local tradition places Robin Hood's marriage to Maid Marian here, with some tellings locating it under the porch archway.

The Domesday survey of 1086 records Edenstow, as it was then spelled, twice: a berewick with "a Church and a priest", five households in total, four smallholders and one priest. No value is recorded, an indication that the settlement was waste at the time.

The village name commemorates Edwin, King of Northumbria, killed at the Battle of Hatfield Chase in 632 or 633. His body was buried in the forest, and by the time his household arrived to take it north to York, a small wooden chapel had already gone up on the spot — the traditional origin of the church that stands there now. Edwinstowe means, roughly, Edwin's resting place.

Pit, Oak and the Wider Sherwood

The other defining chapter is more recent. Thoresby Colliery was sunk between 1925 and 1928, the last colliery sunk in Nottinghamshire, and by 1931 the company had built 497 houses for miners, bringing several older hamlets into the larger village. It employed almost 1,500 men in the early 1980s and ceased production in July 2015, the last working colliery in the county. Cecil Day-Lewis, who lived here as a boy while his father served as village vicar and later became Poet Laureate, wrote in his 1960 memoir The Buried Day that Edwinstowe was where his social conscience was born. The former colliery site is being reclaimed as Thoresby Vale Country Park, with wildflowers and wetland beside a new estate of eight hundred homes.

The Major Oak draws visitors to Sherwood Forest. Estimated at 800 to 1,200 years old, experts believe it has died after failing to produce leaves in 2026; pressures include hot, dry summers, soil compaction from footfall and the protective scaffolding around its propped branches. The tree remains standing as habitat, and saplings have been grown from its acorns and cuttings. Trails start at the Sherwood Forest Visitor Centre: the 1.5-mile Major Oak Trail takes about 45 minutes, and the tree is a 15–20-minute walk from the centre. The Robin Hood Way heads north from the village into the woodland, while the gentler River Maun option follows more open country with a few small hills.

Beyond the village, Thoresby Park's Victorian Courtyard has craft studios, shops, cafés, a military museum and a gallery amid 150 acres of parkland, woodland and gardens. Rufford Abbey Country Park is a free-entry 150-acre park centred on the ruins of a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, with a lake, gardens and woodland walks. Sherwood Pines is a Forestry Commission forest of more than 3,000 acres with waymarked trails, mountain biking and a Go Ape high-wire course. White Post Farm at Farnsfield, about 6.0 miles from Edwinstowe in a straight line, covers around 25 acres and has more than 3,000 animals; road travel is longer. Center Parcs Sherwood Forest is at Rufford.

Routes, Festival and Village Life

Getting here without a car takes more planning than in many Nottinghamshire villages. Edwinstowe’s railway service ended in 1955; Shirebrook is about 5.8 miles away in a straight line, with Mansfield and Mansfield Woodhouse also rail options. Bus services link the village with Mansfield, Ollerton, Worksop, Nottingham, Newark and Lincoln. The village sits just off the B6034, and the Sherwood Forest Visitor Centre, rebuilt in 2018 through a county council-RSPB partnership, has a stop served by most routes through the village.

The long-running Robin Hood Festival has run since the early 1980s, bringing jousting, medieval combat, archery, historical re-enactment, comedy and children’s entertainment to Sherwood Forest, the setting associated with the legend.

The village hall remains a centre of Edwinstowe life, while the Thoresby Colliery Band and its youth section keep the local brass tradition in motion. The bands carry the mining community’s musical legacy beyond the pit itself.