The telephone box outside the Staunton Arms is a Grade II listed K6, cast in 1935, and it's about as close as the village gets to a landmark. Staunton in the Vale doesn't extend much further than the crossroads it sits on: a scatter of brick cottages, the pub, and fields running out toward the Leicestershire and Lincolnshire borders. The parish held 66 people at the last census, spread across two square miles of the Vale of Belvoir.
The Staunton Arms is the only pub, and it's also the only shop, the only restaurant, and the only thing resembling a village hall. It's an early 19th-century brick building on the corner, Grade II listed, with ashlar detailing and a pantile roof, built originally to house workers on the Staunton Hall estate. For its first century and a half it held a six-day licence and closed on Sundays — a condition of the Staunton family's religious beliefs, not tradition or law — and didn't open on a Sunday until the family sold it in 1978. CAMRA's Vale of Belvoir branch has since named it Pub of the Year twice, in 2013 and 2016.
The kitchen runs a Summer A La Carte alongside Light Bites, a vegan menu, and a Sunday Lunch for adults and children, with Fish Friday and Steak Night on rotation. Three cask ales are on at any time, always including a LocAle, with Castle Rock's Harvest Pale and Draught Bass regulars among the rotating guests; CAMRA members get 20p off. Dogs are welcome, though owners eat on the front verandah — "in warm weather it's a treat for all," as one visitor put it. Eight en-suite bedrooms and a two-bedroom cottage nearby mean you can stay without going anywhere else.
There's no shop. The only other commercial premises in the parish are a small industrial estate and a Montessori nursery run by Robert and Adrienne Staunton from a converted barn on the estate. For groceries, it's Newark, six or seven miles north.
A circular walk of around seven kilometres starts and finishes at the pub, taking in Kilvington and Alverton. The village sits about a mile from the Threeshires Bush, where Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire meet, and footpaths run on to Flawborough and the wider Vale.
St Mary's Church was the Staunton family's private chapel before it became the parish church, and it still holds eight centuries of their monuments — an early-14th-century knight with a dog carved at his feet, effigies of Alicia de Loudham and Sir William de Staunton, roughly seventy carved stone heads on the outside walls. A WWII memorial inside incorporates a propeller blade from a crashed Lancaster bomber; another Lancaster came down nearby in 1943, killing all seven of its crew.
The Stauntons have held the manor since before the Conquest — Bryan de Staunton is recorded here in 1041 — and during the Civil War Colonel William Staunton raised a regiment for the King at his own expense, which nearly finished the family off. Parliamentary troops besieged Staunton Hall and drove out his wife and children; she is said to have fired on the attackers from a porch window before the garrison surrendered.
Newark is fifteen minutes away, Belvoir Castle about five, and the A1 a few minutes' drive from the crossroads; bus route 857 runs to Newark Bus Station. In spring, walkers along the Back Dyke sometimes spot Grizzled Skippers at the old quarry reserve — a butterfly scarce enough that its presence here, in a parish of 66 people, is worth mentioning to whoever's staying.
