Fledborough

The viaduct and the hamlet

Fledborough Viaduct runs for 814 metres across the Trent water meadows, 59 brick arches and four steel girder spans carrying nothing more urgent these days than a cycle trail. It was built in 1897, using nine million bricks and £65,000, to carry the main line from Chesterfield to Lincoln. Goods trains used it until 1980, when a derailment nearby did enough damage that nobody bothered repairing it. National Cycle Route 647 crosses the top of it, heading west toward Clumber Country Park and east through Doddington & Harby toward Lincoln.

Fledborough itself is 38 people, according to the 2021 census, spread along the west bank of the Trent with a church that stands alone at the end of a lane and nothing that could be called a village centre. There's no pub. There's no shop. If you want either, you're looking at a neighbouring village, not this one. What Fledborough has is flat, quiet meadowland, a serious church, and a viaduct you can walk or cycle across.

Routes beside the Trent and St Gregory's

The walking is the reason to come. A circular route starts in Dunham-on-Trent, crosses the river to join the Trent Valley Way, and follows the west bank down past Fledborough and its old church to the viaduct. Another starts at the old rail bridge and runs the Dukeries Trail into the village before tracking the Trent to Dunham and cutting across fields to North Clifton.

St Gregory's Church has a 12th-century Norman tower base under a mostly 14th-century body, the chancel rebuilt in 1764 after being recorded as "in a ruinous condition," rebuilt again in 1890, aisles and porch added in 1912 and paid for by Earl Manvers. Inside there's a piscina, fragments of an Easter Sepulchre carved with sleeping soldiers and angels, 14th-century stained glass, and an alms box inscribed "Remember the Poor 1684." Declared redundant around 1965, it passed to the Churches Conservation Trust in 1991. It holds no regular services now, though special events can still be arranged.

An impressive crossing and an ancient record

"The viaduct was functional and impressive but I was unable to capture all of its 59 arches," wrote Norm, of Norms Notes Number Two, after visiting in 2014.

Domesday recorded the village as Fladeburg, worth £8 to its lord in 1066 and £5 by 1086, with 16 villagers, 5 freemen and a mill valued at a shilling, its earliest recorded owner Countess Godiva.

Marriage licences, lost railways and getting there

The odder history belongs to Reverend William Sweetapple, rector from 1712 to 1755, who issued 488 marriage licences and personally married somewhere between 480 and 490 couples between 1730 and 1754, with little in the way of formality. The trade earned Fledborough the nickname "the Gretna Green of the Midlands," and lasted until Hardwicke's Marriage Act tightened the rules in 1753.

Fledborough lost its own station in 1955, then for good in 1965. The nearest working stations are Retford, eight miles north-west, and Newark, twelve miles south, reached on minor roads off the A57 near Tuxford. There are no buses. Laxton, England's last open-field village still farmed in medieval strips, is a short drive away.

Fledborough carries on

Thirty-eight people, one church that no longer needs a congregation, and a viaduct built for trains that stopped running decades ago. Fledborough gets on with it anyway.