North Leverton's windmill has ground flour since 1813, and it's still doing the job it was built for. Five local farmers - William Rogers, William Ellis, William Ashton, John Bower and Thomas Olivant - put up the money to build it, for the parishes of Fenton, North Leverton, Habblesthorpe and Sturton-le-Steeple, and the subscription society they formed still owns it. Most surviving English windmills are static exhibits, sails pinned or removed. This one turns, every Saturday - 11am to 4pm in spring and summer, 11am to 3pm the rest of the year - free in, donation box on the way out, and you can climb all four floors while the sails work above you.
A TripAdvisor reviewer called it "an unspoiled gem... full of atmosphere," which for once undersells it. There's a Family Fun Weekend in early September with craft stalls, food stands, a car show and vintage farm machinery parked round the mill.
The Royal Oak on Main Street is the village's one pub, open-plan and locally busy rather than done up for passing trade. It pours Sharp's Doom Bar on cask, keeps a proper cider, and has darts, dominoes, a real fire, a beer garden and a dog policy that doesn't require asking. Food runs Monday to Saturday lunchtime through early evening, Sunday afternoons only.
Groceries come from the Village Store and Post Office on Main Street, a Premier-branded shop covering the basics - frozen food, beer and wine, papers, a National Lottery counter. It's the only shop in the village; nothing more specific than that means a trip to Retford.
St Martin's is Grade I listed and older than it first looks. The south doorway dates to around 1200, with the chancel and south aisle added a century later under the de Everingham family of Laxton, and the window tracery from that rebuild is reckoned the best thing about the church. It was restored twice in Victorian times, the second in 1878 for £1,200, stripping out what one contemporary account called the "galleries and other unsightly ornaments of the Dark Ages."
Further back, North Leverton appears in the Domesday Book as Legreton, a berewick within the Archbishop of York's soke of Laneham - villagers, freemen, smallholders, a priest, a mill worth sixteen shillings, two fisheries.
There are two circular walks from the village: one to Habblesthorpe and back, flat and roughly 11.7km along footpaths and farm tracks past the Trent floodplain and the windmill; the other, longer, to Sturton-le-Steeple on green lanes and a stretch of the Trent Valley Way, with a few awkward stiles and fields that sometimes have cattle in them. The land is flat Trent Valley washland, and the cooling towers of Cottam and West Burton power stations sit on the skyline to the north - old windmill, new towers, both visible from the road in from Retford.
North Leverton with Habblesthorpe, to give the parish its full name, is the longest village name in England. Retford, on the East Coast Main Line, is the nearest station - about five miles, an eleven-minute drive, with a local bus too. There's a play park, a well-regarded primary school, and North Wheatley with Leverton Cricket Club plays its home season on a pitch here - not a spectacle, just a Saturday fixture, boundary rope up, somebody's mum running the tea urn.
