Gedling

Two pubs on Main Road

The Gedling Inn, on Main Road, was the Chesterfield Arms until 2011, and it's still the Cheggo to anyone who drank there as a Home Ales house before the sign changed.

It runs a 2-for-1 deal on pub food Monday to Saturday and a homemade Sunday lunch from local suppliers, with a quiz on Thursdays and Sky Sports on three screens. The beer garden takes dogs and runs children's activities, and reviewers rate it 4.5 out of 5 on Tripadvisor - 36th out of more than 1,200 restaurants in Nottingham, with the portions and roast dinners praised most.

The Willowbrook, further along Main Road, belongs to Castle Rock Brewery and keeps twelve real ales on, two of them permanent Castle Rock beers, the rest rotating. It's a bigger, newer-feeling room than the Cheggo, with a walled beer garden and free parking across the road. The fish and chips and the hand-cut chips get most of the mentions.

The colliery becomes a country park

Between the two pubs, that's most of a Saturday accounted for.

Gedling Country Park is the other draw, and it used to be the colliery. Five hundred and eighty acres of grassland, woodland, wetland and lagoons now, with viewing platforms looking into Lincolnshire and Leicestershire on a clear day. Short-eared owls and skylarks nest out there, with lapwings and butterflies you don't see on most walks this close to a city. There's a mining-themed tower slide and zip wire for children, and Café 1899 for everyone else.

A free, timed 5k parkrun sets off from the park every Saturday at 9am, on a figure-of-eight course of gravel and tarmac; a junior 2k version runs on Sundays for ages four to fourteen.

Pit of Nations and community sport

The colliery employed 3,746 men at its 1923 peak, drawn from around thirty countries - hence the nickname, the Pit of All Nations. It closed in 1991. A 2019 mural shows it ringed by the flags of those thirty nations.

Gedling Colliery Cricket Club plays at Mapperley Top; the Indoor Bowls Club has run since 1987.

All Hallows and Tolkien

All Hallows' Church has a steeple 180 feet tall - the second-tallest spire in Nottinghamshire, after Newark's - built around 1320 on a much older site. Nikolaus Pevsner noticed the subtle bulge on the sides of the spire and called the effect "elegant, almost sensuous, in an Indian way." Inside, a rood screen dated 1540 survives, moved from its original spot but still there.

J.R.R. Tolkien has a quieter connection to the village. He stayed with Edwin and Jane Neave here in 1904; Edwin is buried in the churchyard. Jane later renamed a nearby farm Phoenix Farm, and visiting in 1914 Tolkien wrote "The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star" there - the poem that grew into Middle-earth.

Routes, rails and remembered pubs

Netherfield is the nearest working station - Gedling's own closed in 1960 - and the A612 bypasses toward the A6097. The number 44, the Red Line, runs between Nottingham, Colwick, Netherfield and Gedling. Colwick Country Park, with its lakes and the Trent Valley Way, is a short drive away.

The Grey Goose, on the site of what's now a care home, closed in October 2010 after decades as the village's other pub - people called it the Mucky Duck. Long enough ago that Gedling Eye still runs reader memories of it, people writing in simply to say they miss the place.