There is a replica of Plymouth Rock in Scrooby, two metres by five, inscribed with the names of all 102 Mayflower passengers. Villagers unveiled it at the Scrooby Show in September 2024. It sits in a village of 307 people that most of England drives past on the A1 without a second look.
The Pilgrim Fathers, on the Great North Road, is the only pub. It was the Saracen's Head until John Smith's brewery bought and renamed it, though the 1771 datestone is still there if you look. The other pub, the George and Dragon, reputedly 800 years old, closed in 1969 and was never replaced. Timothy Taylor Landlord is the sole regular real ale, there's a snug set aside for dogs, and a beer garden for the rest of the year. Cai runs the bar and restaurant, on at least one reported occasion single-handed. Food runs from noon Tuesday to Sunday off a chalkboard that changes daily — fish and chips, burger, Sunday roast, cauliflower cheese, red cabbage, what one reviewer simply called "proper pie". It holds 4.2 out of 5 on TripAdvisor from 167 reviews.
There is no shop. Scrooby is small and residential enough that the pub does the job of a village centre on its own, including a weekly quiz and bike nights through the summer.
St Wilfrid's Church, Grade II*, has an octagonal spire with a clock face and a weather vane, fifteenth-century at its core. William Brewster worshipped here before he fell out with it entirely. Two plaques inside mark the Mayflower connection: one from the Pilgrim Society in 1920, and a bronze one unveiled in 1955 by a return pilgrimage of 104 American descendants of the original passengers. "St Wilfrid's Church — the church that Brewster disavowed — is still standing," wrote the blogger Yorkshire Pudding. "However, the old manor house where he grew up and held puritanical services is no more."
He's right about the manor. Brewster leased it from 1588 while working as the Crown's postmaster, and used it to host a Separatist congregation of forty or fifty who met there in secret on Sundays. In 1608 he organised their escape to Amsterdam, then Leiden, then in 1620 the Mayflower itself; he died at Plymouth Colony in 1644. The manor didn't survive him by much — the gatehouse was pulled down in 1558, and Charles I ordered the rest demolished around 1637, leaving only a farmhouse-sized remnant that still stands.
The Domesday Book valued the whole place at eight pounds, held by the Archbishop of York, with 14 villagers and 6 smallholders working six plough teams between them.
A signed trail follows the route Brewster's congregation is said to have walked to hear their preacher at Babworth, via Barnby Moor and on to Austerfield, birthplace of Plymouth's future governor William Bradford. The River Ryton, which once turned the village's corn mill, still runs under a Great North Road bridge built in 1767. Ogilby's 1675 road book logged the place as "a village of two furlongs" — barely a quarter of a mile end to end, and not much bigger now. There hasn't been a railway station since 1931; Retford and Doncaster, eight and ten miles off, do that job now.
Bawtry, with its tea rooms and independent shops, is a mile and a half up the road. Scrooby just gets on with being 307 people, comparable to its Domesday-era population, and one very good pub.
