Every March, the parish closes the ford on Beanford Lane to traffic so the toads can breed in the swampy ground around it. The smaller ford within the village stays open all year, rarely more than a foot deep, and cars go through it without much ceremony.
Two pubs anchor Oxton, both a short walk from anywhere in the village. The Old Green Dragon sits in the centre, in the middle of the Oxton Estate, and has been CAMRA's Nottingham Pub of the Year two years running. Up to sixteen real ales and ciders are on at any time, including Timothy Taylor's Landlord and a rotating line-up of "LocAles." Chef Blake cooks Wednesday to Sunday: beer-battered haddock with triple-cooked chips at £7.95, sausage and mash at £6.50, and a 32oz rump steak billed as "The Finest Steak in Town" at £25. There's a fenced dog garden out back with benches, parasols, free treats and dog beds for anyone who wants their dog more comfortable than they are.
Ye Olde Bridge Inn, just off the A614, runs three outdoor dining domes seating eight apiece and cooks with Nottinghamshire-reared beef and carrots grown in Oxton. Sunday roasts are the main draw, though reviewers note they can be inconsistent; expect to spend £20 to £30 a head. It has its own children's playground, and there's a further play area and a cricket pitch on the recreation field by the village hall.
The village lost its shop and Post Office in 2018. What replaced it, the Oxton Community Shop, is volunteer-run bar one paid member of staff, and sells what a village shop sells — bread, papers, frozen food, jams, groceries — plus a Post Office counter on Main Street.
St Peter & St Paul's has a Norman core under substantial Victorian rebuilding. Pevsner called the 1927 choir stall woodwork "rich but rustic." In 1584 a member of the Sherbrooke family is recorded decorating the tower with ale poles. Margaret Sherbrooke later founded a school charity in 1783 to teach the village's poor children.
Oxton produced two Sherbrookes worth knowing. John Coape Sherbrooke, born here in 1764, went on to govern Canada. Rear-Admiral Robert St Vincent Sherbrooke, born in 1901, won the Victoria Cross commanding the destroyer escort of an Arctic convoy at the Battle of the Barents Sea in December 1942, against a German cruiser and pocket battleship. Wounded and temporarily blinded early in the action, he kept directing his ships and insisted on hearing every report until the convoy was safe.
Oldox Camp, an Iron Age hillfort with three tiers of rampart rising on its eastern slope, sits a mile and a half up Windmill Lane, and makes a natural loop with Robin Hood Hill and its Bronze Age burial mound, said locally to be where Robin Hood hid his loot. Lowdham station is five miles off; the 747 bus links Oxton to Calverton and Lowdham, and a weekday morning service runs into Nottingham and back.
At Domesday the manor was valued at two pounds in 1066, falling to one by 1086. Nine hundred years on, the toads still get the ford to themselves every March.
