Above the porch of St Giles' Church is a room with a 15th-century oak door, an 18th-century chest, and a table too big to have been carried up the narrow stair — built in place, most likely, though the story people prefer is that a villager called Nan Scott shut herself in there during the plague of 1666, watching her neighbours' funerals through the window below, and stayed on rather than come out to an empty village.
Holme itself is small enough that the legend does most of the talking. Eighty people live here, on the east bank of the Trent, and there is no pub or shop within the village boundary. What Holme has instead is the church on its sandy knoll, a raised embankment path along the river, and a location that's been slightly wrong since the sixteenth century, when a flood shifted the Trent's course and left the village stranded on the far side from its own parish.
The walking makes up for the rest. The path north from Winthorpe follows Holme Lane along the river, then climbs the embankment towards Langford Lowfields, a good five metres above the fields, with Winthorpe's angling lake on one side and North Muskham visible across the water, before reaching the RSPB reserve, where bitterns, marsh harriers and avocets are recorded.
For food and a pint, that's the Muskham Ferry, across the river in North Muskham: beer-battered fish and chips, slow-cooked pies, a Sunday roast, and fresh fish from Grimsby on Wednesdays, with Greene King Abbot and three rotating guest ales. It's dog friendly, has a beer garden over the water, and stands close to where the old ferry used to cross.
The church is the reason to stop. It was rebuilt and doubled in size in the 1480s by John Barton, a wool merchant who died in 1491 and is buried in the chancel beside his wife Isabella, above a carved cadaver tomb. His rebus — a barrel crossed by a bar, punning on "Bar-tun" — turns up throughout the building, beneath a verse from his house window recorded as "I thanke God, and ever shall, It is the sheep have paid for all." Bench-ends are carved with angels, dogs and birds, and medieval glass survives in the chancel and Lady Chapel.
The Trent has flooded here repeatedly — 1683, 1770, 1795, 1875, and most recently on 25 October 2023, cutting the village off by road and affecting around forty properties. The last sturgeon caught in the Trent, eight and a half feet long and 250lbs, was landed near Holme in 1902; during the Civil War, Lord Bellasis of Holme Hall governed Newark Castle when it surrendered to Parliament in 1646.
Newark-on-Trent is four miles south, with its castle, the National Civil War Centre and a market square; Newark Castle station is about the same distance, and a Centrebus 367 stop at Holme Lane runs into town. Collingham, nearby, has two Grade I churches, and Langford Old Hall, an Elizabethan manor built in 1573, is close by.
The embankment path also passes the site of the old Muskham Ferry, which once carried Muskham's children across the water to school in Holme — a crossing needed until the church register and the map agreed on which side everyone actually lived.
