Shelford

From Chapel to Community Pub

The Earl of Chesterfield started life in 1840 as a Primitive Methodist chapel with room for 122 worshippers. The congregation closed in the 1970s and drifted back to the parish church, and the building became Shelford's only pub — which means today's log fires and stone-baked pizzas sit inside what was, for well over a century, a place of nonconformist prayer.

It nearly didn't survive. A community takeover rescued it, and it now trades under the name Shallowford Pub Company, a nod to the village's own name — "sceldu", Old English for shallow, plus ford, for the bend in the Trent where the water thins out enough to cross. The pub is muddy-boots-and-dog-friendly, has a beer garden with country views, and runs Draught Bass and Timothy Taylor Landlord alongside changing guest ales. The honey-roasted ham and eggs and the truffle and parmesan twice-baked soufflé turn up often in reviews; so do the steak pies, though at least one visitor found the fish and chips, served on a wooden board, over-egged for what it was.

Village Provisions and the Parish Church

There's no shop in the village. Residents drive to the Co-op in Burton Joyce, just over a mile off, or the SPAR in East Bridgeford, a little further.

St Peter and St Paul's is Grade II* and worth the walk up from the pub. Its tower carries darker stonework, said to date from 1645, when Royalist defenders were smoked out of it during the storming of Shelford Manor. Inside, on a windowsill in the Stanhope Chapel, sits a fragment of a Saxon cross carved around 900 AD, turned up in a buttress during an 1877 restoration. Two scholars called it "by far the finest early figure sculpture in Nottinghamshire". The restoration itself was paid for by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, who would later fund the dig that found Tutankhamun's tomb, and its architect, Ewan Christian, was dismissed by Pevsner as "an often ruthless restorer".

Domesday and the Storming of Shelford Manor

Domesday recorded a priest and a church here, a mill worth four shillings, a fishery, and a manor whose value had halved to £4 by 1086. The Stanhopes arrived in 1539, after Henry VIII granted them the dissolved priory's land, and stayed for centuries. Their manor house was garrisoned for the King in the Civil War; on 3 November 1645, Parliamentarian troops stormed it and killed somewhere between 140 and 160 men, including its commander, Colonel Philip Stanhope. The historian David Appleby has called it a "frenzied massacre", one both sides preferred to forget.

Walking the Trent Valley Way

The Trent Valley Way runs through the village in both directions, and a footpath from Stoke Ferry Lane crosses fields past the ruined base of a windmill toward Gunthorpe, flat and dog-friendly the whole way, with ridge-and-furrow patterns still visible from the path. A wooden mooring structure on the riverbank is what's left of the ferry that once crossed to Stoke Bardolph and its Ferry Boat Inn.

The Biennial Feast Weekend

Every other year the village holds a feast weekend, with a street market set up around the church and the village hall, and for a couple of days Shelford's 267 residents get considerably more company than usual.