Outside the old forge on Main Street stands a tower of horseshoes, seventeen feet high, built shoe by interlocking shoe by the village blacksmith George Flinders, who worked the Scarrington forge for fifty-one years. He stacked discarded shoes from June 1945 to April 1965, using an estimated fifty thousand of them — self-supporting, no internal column, reckoned to weigh ten tons. It's thought to be the largest such pile in the world, and it very nearly left the country: an American collector agreed to buy it, so Nottinghamshire County Council paid off the buyer to keep it here, in 1973. Flinders kept the original sale money regardless.
That's the thing Scarrington is known for, and it's free to look at, any time you like.
There's no pub in the village itself. The last one closed along with the butcher, wheelwright and shoemaker. What remains is the church, a Methodist chapel and a WI hut. For food and a pint you go two miles, to Aslockton or Car Colston.
The Cranmer Arms in Aslockton is a dog-and-walker-friendly local with a big beer garden, a play area and a skittle alley, cask ales including Black Sheep Best Bitter, food traditionally Fridays only. The Royal Oak in Car Colston is the smarter option — steaks, fish pie, Koffman fries — and has won Vale of Belvoir & Nottinghamshire CAMRA Pub of the Year three times, most recently in 2021. General shopping means Bingham, two and a half miles off, with a Thursday street market and cafes including Gilt and Cured.
The church, St John of Beverley, is worth the walk regardless of what's on. Medieval at the core and restored in the 1860s, its belfry holds three bells cast in 1450. The font under the tower dates from the 1660s, but it isn't the original — that one was thrown out by Cromwell's troops and used afterwards as a pump trough, before being recovered in 1900 and set back in the south aisle. Local tradition holds that a Scarrington man who'd killed a Cromwellian soldier hid in the roof during the Civil War; restorers up there in 1867 found his stash — a cup, a saucer, a plate and a bundle of hay.
Main Street curves in a shallow crescent, red-brick cottages under pantile roofs, grassed verges instead of pavement, and cherry trees that go pink in spring. Opposite the Smithy is the Pinfold, a rare surviving circular brick pound for stray animals. A resident, Mr J. Howard, keeps free-roaming chickens around the village; there's a "slow, hens" sign near the church, and a cockerel on the churchyard wall that lets everyone know it's there.
The circular walk to Screveton and Car Colston is a little over three miles, flat, an hour or so, passing the horseshoe pile on its way out. Aslockton station is 1.3 miles off, with trains to Nottingham; the bus runs twice a week.
Scarrington's Domesday entry calls it Scarintone, a royal possession with twenty-seven households — in the larger 40 per cent of settlements the surveyors recorded. The name derives from Anglo-Saxon for "dirty farm," which nobody here seems to have taken personally. Roy Keane lived in the village in the early nineties, while playing for Nottingham Forest, and it was during that spell that he met his future wife, Theresa.
