Flintham Community Shop is staffed entirely by volunteers, and sells what a village actually runs through in a week: baked beans, toilet roll, milk, bread, eggs, pies, cakes, dog food, cat food, wine and beer, sourced locally where it can.
It occupies the site of a shop that traded for about 150 years before closing in 1982.
In 1990 someone found the old shop's unsold stock and paperwork under dust in the outbuildings behind it. That discovery became the founding collection of Flintham Museum, which opened in May 1999 and was a finalist for European Museum of the Year in 2001.
The Boot and Shoe Inn is the other reason to come. It has four boutique rooms, a recently renovated interior of exposed brickwork, candles and wall sconces, and a garden for drinks when the weather allows it.
The same team runs the White Horse in Lincoln, and the food follows a similar register: venison croquettes at £7.50, mushroom pâté on Hambleton focaccia at £6.50, a heritage pumpkin and goats cheese pie at £18, venison loin at £32, Sunday roasts from £17.
One TripAdvisor reviewer called the roast potatoes "the best pub/restaurant roast potatoes we think we've ever had." Another noted the prices sit on the higher side for a village pub, which the venison loin does nothing to dispute.
The pub is dog friendly, and it's also the start and finish of a signposted five-mile circular walk out through Syerston, Elston and Sibthorpe and back — flat, easy, about three hours at no particular pace.
St Augustine's church has a Norman tower with herringbone stonework and four bells, the oldest cast in 1613.
The nave is younger — rebuilt in Mansfield stone in 1828 after the original became ruinous — so what you're looking at is a Victorian nave attached to a Norman tower, the join fairly plain to the eye.
The Domesday Book records a church and a priest here in 1086, along with 36 households and a value to the lord of one pound, which was also its value in 1066 under a man named Thori, son of Roald. By 1086 it belonged to Reginald of Flintham.
Flintham Hall dates from 1798, was extended by the architect Lewis Wyatt in the 1820s and 1830s, and was remodelled in the 1850s by Thomas Chambers Hine, who added the tower, the turret and a conservatory said to be the finest of its kind in the country.
The hall itself isn't generally open, though the walled gardens go on show occasionally through the National Garden Scheme.
Myles Thoroton Hildyard, who inherited it, won the Military Cross escaping a German prisoner-of-war camp after the fall of Crete, and later spent decades restoring the park, the conservatory and the garden he'd grown up in. The hall has since stood in for period drama, including Easy Virtue with Colin Firth.
Newark station is six or seven miles off, the village sits just off the A46, and NottsBus On Demand runs a bookable service into Newark, Monday to Saturday, 9:30 till 2:30.
Flintham's Plough Boy's Play, a seven-character folk drama running to 151 lines, hadn't been performed since 1925 until the Foresters Morris Men revived it in 2014 with the village's own schoolboys playing the parts.
