Newark-on-Trent

Market flavours and a medieval pub

The smoking aroma from G.H. Porter Provisions drifts across the Market Place most mornings, coming off sugar-pit cured, maple-cured and triple-smoked bacon in a shop that has stood on this spot since 1890. The dual-aspect shopfront sells the Newark Sausage, Stilton-topped pork pies, wild venison burgers and coffee roasted in-house on an old-fashioned roaster. Reviewers say it isn't the cheapest butcher in town. Nobody seems to mind.

You're standing in one of the largest and finest cobbled market squares in the country, ringed by Georgian, Victorian and medieval buildings, with markets recorded here since the twelfth century — Newark claims to have been the first town in England to hold one on a Wednesday. On the west side is Newark Town Hall, designed by John Carr and completed in 1776: seven bays of ashlar stone, a Doric portico on four columns, a statue of Justice on top, and a reasonable claim to being one of the finest Georgian town halls anywhere. Two more butchers work the same trade nearby — F. Doncasters, founded on Portland Street in 1920 and now run by the fourth generation, and Richard's Quality Meats, known for handmade sausages and for stocking the Henry Walker pork pie.

The pubs are where Newark makes its case, and there are enough of them that a weekend doesn't cover it. The Prince Rupert, on Stodman Street, is a half-timbered, higgledy-piggledy medieval building dating to around 1452, named after the Royalist Civil War commander. It closed for four years before Thurlby's Knead pubs group restored it and reopened it on 17 March 2010; it was voted CAMRA Newark Pub of the Year the following year. Five handpumps turn over an ever-changing range of real ale, there's a terraced beer garden and a conservatory, and an upstairs room that isn't advertised but can be booked for private hire.

Alehouses by the Trent and the castle

Fox & Crown, on Appletongate, is the town-centre outpost of Castle Rock Brewery — one of 22 pubs the brewery owns — sharing the building with Yupp Beer's headquarters. Ten cask and ten keg lines run through it, plus a shop stocking more than seventy bottled and canned beers, and food comes daily from Holy Moly, mixing Mexican dishes in with more traditional fare. It shut in August 2020 and reopened under Castle Rock and Yupp in 2022. A short walk away, tucked into Swan & Salmon Yard off Castle Gate, Just Beer Micropub keeps things plainer: four changing cask ales, ciders, perries, no food, no music, and three beer festivals a year. It has been Newark CAMRA's Town Pub of the Year ten times and the region's Pub of the Year on more than one occasion, and it is close enough to the castle and the Town Lock that you can walk there without checking a map.

The Flying Circus does craft beer under a steampunk-and-aviation theme, model planes hanging from the ceiling and a rotating list that includes things you won't find pulled anywhere else in Newark — Beavertown Gamma Ray has turned up on the taps, and the owners will let you try before you commit to a pint. There's a large beer garden for warmer evenings and a small stage for the live music that runs regularly. Down by the water, three pubs make the most of the Trent directly. Castle Barge is a former Spillers grain barge that once worked the run between Hull and Gainsborough, converted into a pub in 1980 and moored at the Town Wharf under the castle walls ever since, under the same ownership the whole time. It does award-winning pies and sausages, Scottish steaks and barge-made curries, stays open until midnight, and pulls three handpumps of local ales — Full Mash, Pheasantry, Lincoln Green. The Water's Edge, opposite the castle on Castle Gate, has balconies and terraces stacked over the river; next door, the Swan & Salmon Pub & Kitchen looks out at the same view through floor-to-ceiling windows and does a seafood linguine and a beef stroganoff alongside the more expected Sunday roast and fish and chips.

Newark Castle itself sits above all this, and it's worth knowing what you're looking at. Bishop Remigius de Fécamp founded it in 1073; Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, known as "the Magnificent," rebuilt it in stone. There was never a central keep — just an encircling wall with towers, and a gatehouse that Historic England rates as the most complete of its type in the country, since it held the main chambers itself. King John died here on the night of 18 October 1216, reputedly after a surfeit of peaches washed down with cider, though some chroniclers preferred poison. Tradition puts him in the low Norman tower at the castle's south-west corner, though historians now think an apartment in the gatehouse more likely. The castle is currently mid-restoration, backed by a £1.4 million National Lottery Heritage Fund grant among other money, with an eventual reopening expected to pull in around 17,000 extra visitors a year.

Sieges, gold and a soaring spire

During the Civil War the town chose the King's side and held to it through three sieges, in 1643, 1644 and 1645–46. Two earthwork forts went up outside the walls — the Queen's Sconce and the King's Sconce — along with 2.25 miles of defences. The garrison was never beaten in the field. It surrendered in May 1646 only because Charles I, having given himself up to the Scots at Southwell, wrote and told it to. The Queen's Sconce survives intact in Sconce and Devon Park, a diamond of raised earth still recognisably a fort, and is reckoned one of the best-preserved seventeenth-century earthworks anywhere. On Stodman Street, the Governor's House served as headquarters through the sieges of 1643 and 1646; Charles I is said to have stayed there, and restoration work turned up a long-drop toilet behind a wall, reputedly the king's own. A plaque nearby marks the house of Alderman Hercules Clay, a Newark mercer who dreamed three nights running that his home was burning, moved his family out, and watched a mortar bomb aimed at the Royalist governor's residence hit the actual building on the night of 11 March 1644.

The National Civil War Centre, on Appletongate, opened in 2015 and holds two objects that have no business sharing a building and somehow do. One is the Newark Torc: a complete Iron Age gold-alloy torc, 700 grams of rolled wire plaited into eight ropes and twisted together, found by a metal detectorist on the edge of town in February 2005 and probably made by the same Norfolk craftsman responsible for a near-identical torc found at Sedgeford. The other is the actual printing press used in November 1806 to run off Lord Byron's first book, "Fugitive Pieces," printed privately in Newark when the poet was eighteen. He burned most of the copies himself after a clergyman objected to one poem as indecent; only four are known to survive, one of them incomplete.

St Mary Magdalene Church rises over all of it with a tower and spire reaching 232 feet to the base of the weathervane, reputedly the tallest church spire in the county. It was built in stages across three and a half centuries, from the twelfth-century crypt through the Perpendicular additions of the early sixteenth. Nikolaus Pevsner called the nave "a wonder of proportion." It's a lot of church for a market town, and it earns the description.

Riverside walks and days out

For walking, the riverside park gives you a footpath along the Trent to the Town Lock, then across the water to the castle's Victorian gardens. The Trent Valley Way runs through town on its 108-mile route from Nottingham to the Humber; heading east from Newark toward Collingham it follows a riverside path for 200 metres before turning onto a track that becomes Westfield Lane. Sconce and Devon Park has surfaced footpaths threading the whole site, and a Fitness Zone that hosts parkruns and walking groups alongside the earthwork itself.

There's more to do than eat and drink. The Palace Theatre on Appletongate opened in 1920 and is still running a full programme of music, comedy and drama, a short walk from the centre. Newark Tennis Club, founded in 1887, has four floodlit courts and two grass ones. Newark RUFC fields rugby teams from minis to veterans and runs a cricket section formed in the 1960s so the rugby players would have something to do over summer. On the edge of town, the Newark and Nottinghamshire Showground hosts the Newark International Antiques & Collectors Fair every other month, billed as the largest of its kind in Europe, and Newark Air Museum, built on the former RAF Winthorpe bomber station, has more than ninety aircraft and cockpit sections across sixteen acres.

Ways in, ways onward and one last pint

Two railway stations serve the town: Newark Northgate on the East Coast Main Line, with direct trains to King's Cross, and Newark Castle, closer to the centre, on the line between Nottingham and Lincoln. The two lines cross just north of the stations at what's said to be the last flat, ungated railway crossing in Britain — trains from two different directions sharing one crossing with no bridge between them. The A1 and A46 bypasses keep most through-traffic off the Market Place; Nottingham is about 21 miles by road, Lincoln around half an hour. Buses from Newark Bus Station run to Nottingham, Mansfield, Grantham, Lincoln and Retford, and there's a direct service to Southwell about four times a day. Southwell Minster itself is under nine miles away, Sherwood Forest and the Major Oak are within easy reach for a longer walk, and Lincoln's cathedral and Steep Hill are half an hour up the A46.

At Just Beer Micropub, one reviewer described sitting down and asking a stranger at the next table whether they'd mind if their dog was given a biscuit. The stranger didn't mind. Nobody wrote anything else about it, because there wasn't anything else that needed saying.