The Barley Mow on Church Lane is a Grade II listed building, tied at one time to the Worksop & Retford Brewery Co, and, at time of writing, has no landlord. It's up for tenancy, a business opportunity rather than a pub you can walk into for a pint. That leaves Mattersey, a few miles north of Retford on the banks of the River Idle, without a pub of its own for now. The nearest working ones are out at Clarborough and Blyth.
What the village does have is the General Store and Post Office on Retford Road, which does both jobs from one counter and closes for lunch between half twelve and half one like it's still 1975.
All Saints' Church is the more serious building. Grade I listed, its core dates to the late 13th century, with a tower added after 1402. Inside are two unrestored carved stone panels thought to have come from Mattersey Priory after its dissolution — one showing St Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar, the other St Helena finding the True Cross — plus a Victorian font from 1857 and a tomb recess for Isabel de Chauncy. An old market cross stands in the churchyard, moved there at some point from elsewhere in the village, though nobody recorded where.
Arthur Mee, writing in 1938, said the village "looks its loveliest from the fine little bridge carrying the road over the Idle, a picture of red and grey walls gathered round a venerable church." It still does.
The reason people come is a mile up Abbey Road: Mattersey Priory, founded around 1185 by Roger FitzRalph for the Gilbertine order, the only monastic order to have started in England rather than been imported to it. You leave the car in the village and walk — English Heritage classes it as a bridleway with no vehicle access, and the last stretch crosses a stile into a private field where livestock may be grazing, the track potholed and puddled in the wrong weather. What's left after the 1279 fire and the 1538 dissolution is modest: three arches from the canons' refectory, the foundations of a 14th-century kitchen, a 15th-century tower, on a gravel rise where the Idle bends round through the meadows. Some of the stone was rafted down from quarries at Maltby and ended up in the gable wall of Abbey Farm.
Domesday has Mattersey down as land for six and a half plough teams, with 2 villagers, 12 freemen and 3 smallholders, held by King William and Roger of Bully, having previously belonged to Earl Tostig Godwinson before Stamford Bridge finished him. Mattersey Thorpe, in the same parish, has a stranger, more recent history: 157 prefabricated bungalows went up there in the Second World War for munitions workers, on streets named after wartime commanders — Bader Rise, Wavell Crescent, Cunningham Close.
For walking beyond the priory there's a roughly seven-mile circuit from the church taking in Barrow Hills, an SSSI former sandpit with views over the Idle valley, and a longer route linking Scrooby, Mattersey Thorpe, Everton, Harwell and Bawtry. Retford station, on the East Coast Main Line, is about six miles south; Nottsbus Connect and Stagecoach services run a handful of times a day between Retford and Mattersey's Main Street.
Mattersey Primary School sits on Thorpe Road, and over in Mattersey Thorpe there's a play area on The Green, with playing fields and a community centre alongside it — the kind of small infrastructure that keeps a parish of under 800 people going between one bus and the next.
