The Bottle & Glass has two bar areas, each with its own log fire, a spacious restaurant, a private lounge and a function room — a lot of pub for a village of just over three hundred people. It's the only one Harby has, and it earns its keep. The 18th-century building on the High Street does modern gastropub food: steak pies, fillet steak, burgers, and wood-fired pizzas cooked at an outdoor bar open from 4pm on Fridays, 2pm at weekends, weather allowing. The haddock goujons come in a homemade soda batter, and Sunday roasts run as you'd expect. One Tripadvisor reviewer titled their review "A pub food renaissance in Harby!"
Dogs are welcome, and the beer garden was named one of the Top UK Beer Gardens by The Sun. Reviews lean toward praise for food and portions, with the odd note about price.
Beyond the pub, Harby keeps things plain. There is no permanent shop. The nearest food shopping is Spinney Farm Shop, a mile off on the B1190 towards Doddington, which also sells logs. Milk is delivered Tuesdays and Saturdays by East Anglia Dairy. A mobile library calls once a month, and the Post Office sets up in the Village Hall on Monday and Thursday afternoons.
The Village Hall runs a Thursday toddler group, a craft circle, and an art group on Wednesdays. Down at the Playing Fields off Church Road there's a play park, a bowls green, and car boot sales from April to October. Allotments can be rented on Wigsley Road.
National Cycle Route 64 runs through the village along the old Chesterfield–Lincoln railway line, closed in 1980, now a flat, traffic-free route toward Lincoln. A circular walk crosses into Lincolnshire after about a mile, reaches Skellingthorpe Woods, and returns via Doddington Hall, an Elizabethan mansion with its own farm shop.
Harby is the easternmost village in Nottinghamshire, bordering Lincolnshire directly.
The history arrives mostly at once. Queen Eleanor of Castile died in a manor house here in November 1290, with Edward I at her bedside, and the grief-stricken procession that carried her body to Westminster gave England the Eleanor Crosses. All Saints' Church, rebuilt in 1874 after the medieval chapel fell into disrepair, carries a statue of her in the tower wall and a brass in the chancel floor: "Here died Eleanor of Castile, Queen of England, Nov. 27th, A.D. 1290." Next to the churchyard, the moated site of the manor house survives as a scheduled monument.
Not all the drama is medieval. On 9 January 1957, a jet on a training flight from RAF Worksop crashed into the village centre, destroying a house and killing a resident, Mrs Lois Towning; the site later became the Village Hall. Down Mill Field Close stands a five-storey windmill from around 1877, capless now, converted into somebody's home.
The Domesday survey valued the whole place at two pounds in 1066, dropping to one by 1086.
Lincoln is roughly twenty minutes away by road; Newark-on-Trent is the nearest town in the other direction, and Saxilby is the nearest station. In the meantime, Harby gets on with being 336 people, one very good pub, and a Post Office that turns up twice a week in a village hall built on the site of a plane crash.
