All Saints' Church has a bullet hole in its own front door, left by Cromwell's troops during the siege of Newark two miles up the road. The door handles, according to local tradition, once offered sanctuary from arrest.
You're two miles south of Newark-on-Trent here, in flat country where the River Devon slips through water meadows on its way to the Trent. Hawton had 80 people at the last census and covers a little over two square miles. Footpaths link it to Thorpe, Cotham and Farndon — the four villages share a single parish benefice, which tells you how closely they're stitched together on foot.
There's no pub in Hawton itself, and no record of one having existed. For a proper pint you go to Newark: the Prince Rupert, or the Castle Barge, a grain barge moored on the Trent and doing duty as a pub for the last forty years. The Royal Oak at Car Colston, tucked behind the village green, is the other option, a few miles the other way.
Hawton keeps two small businesses going. The Newark Saddler does saddle restoration and fitting, run by Harriet Haivers. Future Fishing sells tackle. That's it — no butcher, no bakery, no general shop.
For fishing on a larger scale there's Hawton Waters, an 800-acre lakeside estate on Cotham Lane with lodges, a shepherd's hut and touring pitches. Guests fish free — carp over 38lb have come out of the lake, along with pike, bream, roach and rudd — and there's paddleboarding, rowing and open-water swimming. It's adults-only.
The Farndon Circular Walk follows the Trent from the marina at Farndon, a short walk from Hawton along the shared footpaths.
All Saints' itself is Grade I listed and worth the detour on its own. Pevsner called the chancel "one of the most exciting pieces of architecture in the country." Inside, on the north wall, is an Easter Sepulchre carved around 1330: sleeping Roman soldiers at the base, the risen Christ with his graveclothes draped over one shoulder, and apostles gazing up at a pair of ascending feet, complete with a carved footprint. It survived Cromwell's men because someone had plastered over it — restorers found it again in 1843, and a plaster cast went to the Great Exhibition eight years later. The carving is thought too good for a village this size, and scholars wonder if Hawton was meant to be something grander — a collegiate church that never quite happened.
Outside, the earthworks are still visible: three redoubts built here in 1645, part of the Parliamentarian ring around Royalist Newark, fourteen miles of trenches holding 16,000 men against a garrison of 2,500. It's a Scheduled Monument now, in fields that also turn out, in 1086, to have supported four separate Domesday manors and two churches — an early confirmation that people were worshipping on this spot before the Conquest.
Newark itself is five minutes by car: free castle grounds, a Market Square antiques fair with some 4,000 stalls, and Newark Castle station beyond it. Hawton's own transport is the NottsBus On Demand service, bookable by app, mornings into early afternoon, Monday to Saturday.
St Catherine's Well, the spring that once fed Hawton's long-vanished flax mill, still exists — under a metal drain cover in someone's private garden, doing nothing in particular, the way old wells do once the villages around them stop needing water from the ground.
