The village sign at Sturton le Steeple reads "The Town on the Street," a reference to the Roman road it sits beside, once the route from Lincoln to York and known locally as Ermine Street. The village sits on a dry rise above the Trent's floodplain, flat carrland that grows wheat, rapeseed, onions and sugar beet.
You'll see the church tower before you see anything else, visible for some distance across the fields, unusual for a village of fewer than 550 people.
There is one pub, the Reindeer Inn on Church Street, and it is the only one in the village. It started life as The Stag, was renamed in 1895, and was refitted in 2014 with a real fire and a proper beer garden. CAMRA calls it "a well kept village pub catering for the locals," which it is: food Sunday lunchtimes and Friday and Saturday evenings, cask Eagle Bombardier at the bar, dogs welcome.
There's no butcher, baker or farm shop in the village. The post office on Cross Street opens Wednesdays only, 1pm to 4pm, and a mobile post office van calls at the Reindeer's car park, 3.30 to 4.45.
For walkers, the Trent Valley Way passes close by, and a signposted circuit runs out through Clarborough Nature Reserve to the windmill at North Leverton and back — about seven miles on green lanes with views, on a clear day, into three counties.
The church is St Peter and St Paul, Grade II*, its core dating to around 1180 and financed by Lady Oliva de Montbegon, whose monument is still inside. The tower went up in stages between 1340 and 1480. Despite the village's name, the church has no steeple — what it has instead is a tower, pinnacled, gargoyled eight times over, with twelve crocketed points along the top, and it was that tower which gave the village its suffix in 1823. Cornelius Brown called it "a prominent feature in the landscape" in 1896.
Fire gutted most of the church in 1901; Charles Hodgson Fowler rebuilt it the following year, which is why Arthur Mee could later write that the tower "is almost the only part of the church which escaped." Inside is a marble slab to Colonel Francis Thornhagh, a Parliamentarian cavalry commander killed at the Battle of Preston in 1648. Six bells hang in a frame built for eight; five were cast in 1825, the sixth added in 1991.
The bigger story is upstairs in the church register. John Robinson, born here around 1576, preached illegally from this pulpit before leading his Separatist congregation to Leiden in 1608 — remembered as the Pilgrim Pastor, though he never made the crossing to Massachusetts himself. He married a local woman, Bridget White; her sister Katherine married John Carver, who became the first governor of Plymouth Colony. John Smyth, an early English Baptist, was also born in the village.
There's no railway station now; it closed in 1964, and the nearest trains run from Retford or Gainsborough, both about six miles off, with the Stagecoach 95 bus running between the two and stopping in the village along the way.
Sturton is still here, and on a Wednesday afternoon you can watch its entire postal system arrive in a van and park outside the pub.
