Elston

The Chequers, Past and Present

The Chequers Inn on Toad Lane takes its name from the exchequer — the checkered tables once used by local moneylenders — and for a while the pub filled in as an informal village bank before anyone got round to building one. It opened as a coaching inn in 1840, though the building is over 250 years old, and it's the only survivor of the three pubs Elston kept in the 19th century.

The menu changes with the seasons and runs to a genuinely large gluten-free selection. Sunday lunch comes with Yorkshire puddings on the large side and a vintage cheddar cauliflower cheese; recent reviews single out the crème brûlée, and describe the food as reasonably priced with generous portions. Dogs get treats at the bar; the pub opens Wednesday to Sunday, lunch from noon and dinner from five.

The other two pubs didn't make it. The King William IV shut in 1915 and is a private house now, the Old Alehouse; the Horse and Gears closed in 1936 and became Corner Cottage.

Village Provisions and the Battlefield

Elston Village Shop, at Old Church Barn on Top Street next to the green, opened in 2005 and is the village's only shop — groceries, local produce, newspapers, bread and cakes ordered in from Turners bakery.

For walking, there's a circular route taking in the Battle of Stoke battlefield, Elston Chapel, and the Willow Rundle, a spring on Elston Lane where, local tradition has it, a soldier mortally wounded in the battle stopped for a last drink. The battle, fought in 1487 at the western edge of the parish, was the actual last battle of the Wars of the Roses — two years after Bosworth and rather less well remembered for it.

A Mansion and the Darwin Legacy

At the edge of the village, Eden Hall occupies a Tudor-Gothic mansion built in the 1870s for a malting magnate, furnished with Napoleon III's cast-offs from the Tuileries Palace. It's a day spa now, after stints as a chicken farm, a Rolls-Royce dealership, and, briefly, a maggot farm.

All Saints Church holds fourteen marble monuments to the Darwin family, who held Elston Hall from 1680 into the 20th century and paid for most of the church's restorations. Erasmus Darwin — physician, poet, and Charles Darwin's grandfather — was born at the Hall in 1731. He founded the Lunar Society with Josiah Wedgwood and James Watt, and set out a theory of evolution in Zoonomia two generations before his grandson made it famous.

The Old Chapel and Domesday

A field to the north-east holds Elston Chapel, Grade I listed and older than anything else standing in the parish: a plain nave-and-chancel building, no tower, no porch, and, after more than 900 years, no known dedication. Pevsner called it a "solitary barn-like chapel." It housed prisoners after the 1487 battle and held its last wedding in 1873.

Domesday valued the whole settlement at ten shillings, the same in 1066 as in 1086 — twenty years of Norman conquest and not a shilling's difference.

Getting Here and Village Continuity

Newark Northgate station is five miles off, the A46 half a mile away, and a booked minibus, Nottsbus On Demand, runs into Newark Monday to Saturday.

The Anne Darwin Almshouses have housed parish pensioners since 1744. The residents used to wear grey coats marked with a red "AD." The coats are gone. The pensioners are still there.