Gringley-on-the-Hill

The Last Pub Standing

The Blue Bell on the High Street is the last pub standing in Gringley-on-the-Hill. It's an eighteenth-century building, run by Adam Kay, who returned in 2019 after an earlier stint from 2011 to 2016. The menu runs to homemade pies, a local favourite, alongside Sunday lunch, pizzas, skewers, and a Dirty Dog menu — about as close as it comes to a formal dog policy.

There's a beer garden with countryside views, a heated covered terrace, and a rotating selection of real ales. Quiz nights and live music run weekly, and street-food weekends bring guest food trucks into the courtyard.

Ridge, Roads and Lost Shops

Beyond the Blue Bell there isn't much shopping. The parish council says it plainly: "the post office has gone. All the shops and garages which populated the village in the early 20th century are also gone." Gringley is a commuter village now, some farming behind the scenes, nowhere to buy milk on the way in.

The village sits on a ridge, the highest point on the road between Bawtry and Gainsborough, looking north over the old marshland of the Carrs and, on a clear day, south-east to Lincoln Cathedral across the Trent valley. Arthur Mee called it "an airy village" with "lovely views and steep and dangerous ways" in 1938, and walking up from the canal to the High Street you still feel the climb. The A631 runs along the village's south edge; Retford station is about eight miles south, with a local bus via Clayworth.

Walks, Water and the Norman Church

What the village has instead of shops is the walking. Beacon Hill, a levelled prehistoric mound on the east side with scarped sides up to eleven metres high, gives a view the parish council calls five counties wide. Below it, the Chesterfield Canal, built by James Brindley, runs along the foot of the ridge past the Drakeholes Tunnel on the Cuckoo Way towpath — level, easy walking. A circular route to Clayworth and back along the canal runs about 8 miles.

St Peter & St Paul's church, Grade II*, began as a Norman building around 1180 and picked up a Perpendicular Gothic tower with four pinnacles and six bells, the oldest cast in 1520 by Robert Mellors. It's mentioned in Domesday Book, though nothing of that first building survives. The Domesday entry values the whole place at £10 in 1066, down to £4 by 1086.

Four Pubs and Forty Degrees

Four pubs once lined the High Street when it was a busy turnpike road — the Blue Bell, the White Hart, the Cross Keys and the Butchers Arms. The White Hart doubled as the post office in 1844, handling mail to Louth, Bawtry and Sheffield, before closing in 1980 and becoming a private house. The Cross Keys' licence moved to a new building on the bypass in 1935; the Butchers Arms is a private house today, known as Sunnyside Cottage.

On 19 July 2022, Gringley-on-the-Hill recorded 40.1°C — the northernmost place in the UK ever to go above 40 degrees.

A Park and Finds from the Past

There's a new community-funded play park by the recreation ground, and an active History Club running since 2010. A Victorian regimental button from the Queen's 16th Lancers turned up in a resident's garden on Middlebridge Road. A silver seal, found separately nearby by metal detector, was examined by a museum in 2004.