The bar in the Beehive is barely bigger than a domestic front room, and the snug across the hall is smaller still — a hatch counter, a few benches, room for maybe eight people if nobody stands up too suddenly. It's reputedly the smallest pub in Nottinghamshire, and having stood inside it, that's not obviously an exaggeration.
The building dates from 1803 and was called the Gate Inn until renamed in 1844. CAMRA lists it on the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, a One Star listing for special national historic interest — fittings largely unchanged since the Second World War, down to the copper-topped counter and beamed ceiling. Two real ales, usually Castle Rock Harvest Pale and Preservation, both on handpump. No kitchen, no food, cash only.
Tuesday is dog night, when regulars bring their own and treats appear behind the bar. The landlady, Claudine, keeps a fifteen-year-old cat and doesn't do email; she's said she finds it "a pleasant surprise to find people who want to remain private," which tells you something about the pub she runs.
A previous landlord kept a pig that he let loose every evening to finish off whatever was left in the barrels. A picture of George Brough hangs on the wall — the Nottingham man behind the Brough Superior, the "Rolls-Royce of motorcycles" — and bikers and car clubs turn up accordingly. The garden sits between the pub and its former outbuildings, once the outside lavatories, looking over the village.
That is the whole of Maplebeck's commercial life. There's no shop — this is a hamlet of around a hundred people. Instead there's Turton Memorial Hall, opened in 2015 and built and paid for by the community itself, with a sprung floor for dance classes, a Friday fitness session, and a Stay and Play group for small children.
Walkers get more choice than diners. A figure-of-eight route starts from a small car park on the Maplebeck–Winkburn road, loops through Winkburn and back across the fields; a longer circuit links Maplebeck with Kirklington, Caunton and Winkburn. The Robin Hood Way, from Nottingham Castle into Sherwood Forest, passes through here, and a toposcope near the village marks Southwell Minster three miles off. You get here down single-track lanes, off the A617 via Winkburn Lane, or the A616 near Beesthorpe Hall. Nearest station is Lowdham; the bus runs about twice a week.
St Radegund's Church is thirteenth-century in its oldest parts, with two original lancet windows in the chancel — one of only five churches in England dedicated to St Radegund. Most of the woodwork, altar rails, pulpit, benches, is Jacobean. A stone slab, thought to be a medieval tomb cover, turned up during restoration work. In the churchyard is a yew with a girth of 671cm, classed as Ancient; a writer described it in 1864 as "a fine yew tree, supposed to be very old," which remains accurate.
The Domesday survey recorded Mapebec as held by the King, seventeen households, four ploughlands. Maplebeck is also a Thankful Village, one of the small number that lost no men in the First World War, and it turns up on Darren Hayman's album about them.
A local historian named Judith cleans the gravestones in the churchyard with a toothbrush, matching the names she finds back to the parish records.
