The Fox Inn's salt and pepper squid bites got five out of five for food from a Newark Advertiser reviewer, who called them "exquisite" with "the texture spot on". It's on Main Street, an old multi-room pub with beamed ceilings, hidden nooks and a raised restaurant area, recently renovated.
The menu runs to ham hock and cheddar croquettes, a Cumberland sausage ring with mash, pan-seared thyme chicken, whole tail scampi, and steak and venison pies praised for their generous filling, plus a wood-fired pizza night every Saturday. Two courses each and a drink came to £57 for two. On the reviewer's visit, one waitress ran the bar and the restaurant single-handed, "gliding through" and getting called lovely and attentive for it.
Dogs are welcome in the bar, there's a grassed beer garden with room for motorhomes to hook up, a kids' play area, pool table and darts board, and Morland's Old Speckled Hen on regular pour alongside two changing guest ales.
Across the road, the Kitchen Garden Restaurant at Kelham House Country Manor Hotel does modern British and European food in a dining room lined with glass doors looking over the gardens. One diner called a meal for ten of them "absolutely perfect from start to finish". Between the Fox and the Kitchen Garden, that's the whole food and drink offer here — there's no village shop.
The Hall grounds are worth a look even if you're not eating there: 42 acres with adventure play areas, three tennis courts, 24 fishing pegs, a woodland trail, a campsite and a cafe with pre-bookable afternoon teas. The Trent riverside path follows the bank past anglers' pegs, into woodland and across the playing fields back towards the Hall, and the Trent Valley Way runs through the parish too. Newark is about six minutes away by car or a roughly three-hourly Stagecoach bus; the nearest station is Rolleston, three miles off.
Kelham Hall itself was built in 1859-63 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, in brick from Retford with Ancaster stone, after fire destroyed the older Manners-Sutton house in 1857. Scott liked the design enough to reuse it, at a larger scale, for the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras a few years later. From 1903 to 1972 the Hall trained ordinands for the Anglican Society of the Sacred Mission — the "Kelham Fathers", still remembered locally by that name — who added a domed chapel in 1928, on completion the second-largest concrete dome in England. It was council headquarters until 2017, and is now a wedding and conference venue.
Kelham turns up in the Domesday Book split across five separate owners rather than one, an unusual arrangement for so small a manor, and St Wilfrid's Church, Grade I listed, has a tower from the end of the 14th century and a memorial to Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton, who died in 1723.
Charles I came here on 5 May 1646, straight from dinner at Southwell Minster, to surrender to the Scots army camped in the fields across the Trent, held under a guard of honour — no visitors, no letters without permission — most likely at Robert Sutton's manor house rather than the Hall itself. On 8 May he was led away so fast that his barber, sent for to trim his hair, was left behind and had to be carried off to Newcastle to finish the job.
