The Red Lion on Southwell Road is not just the best pub in Thurgarton. It is more or less the only business left, now that Priory Stores, the 1960s post office, has become a beauty salon.
That would matter less if the Red Lion weren't good at its job. It holds two AA Rosettes and sources meat from James Vickers, fish from Paulo's Seafoods, and the rest from All Shires Foods and Fruit Basket, all within thirty miles. Steak Night is Thursday, chippy tea is Friday, and Sunday lunch is served in a dining room called the Clarke Restaurant. TripAdvisor reviewers describe "excellent, well-prepared food and exceptional waitress service."
An ale house has stood on the site since the 16th century, and the current one nearly didn't survive its own. It closed for two years before the village bought it in 2019 and started running it themselves, having had it registered as an Asset of Community Value three years earlier. Sit at one of sixteen covers out front, or a picnic table among the five round the back, with a pint of Castle Rock Harvest Pale or Draught Bass and a dog under the table — the pub takes them on leads, usually somewhere quieter.
Behind the pub, and behind most of the village, is the priory. Founded around 1119 by Ralph de Aincourt for Augustinian canons, it rivalled Southwell Minster in scale until the Dissolution in 1534, after which most of the buildings were pulled down for stone. What survived — the six-stage west tower and a fragment of nave — was absorbed into the parish church, the Priory Church of St Peter, and the join is where you'd expect it: the west door, dogtooth-carved and pointed, is 13th century and usually singled out as one of the finest of its kind in England.
One of the canons who lived here, Walter Hilton, wrote The Scale of Perfection at Thurgarton in the late 1380s, still working on the second book when he died in 1396. It became one of the standard texts of English mysticism, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494 at the request of Lady Margaret Beaufort. A walking route named after him, the Walter Hilton Way, follows footpaths and lanes from the priory to Southwell Minster, about three miles over the ridge. Trains from Thurgarton's own Grade II listed station take about fifteen minutes into Nottingham.
Domesday valued the whole manor at £3 in 1066, rising to £4 by 1086, worked by twelve villagers, ten freemen, two smallholders and a priest — roughly the population of Thurgarton then, and not far off the number it would take to fill the Red Lion's beer garden now.
The Civil War treated the place less gently. Sir Roger Cooper fortified the Tudor priory house and lined its hedges with musketeers as one of the garrisons ringing Newark; Parliament took the house anyway. The historian Robert Thoroton later summed him up as "a worthy honest gentleman whose fidelity and constancy to the royal interest weakened his fortunes," which is one way of putting it.
Fisk and Thurgarton Cricket Club still plays most weekends, and the Village Hall doubles as the parish council chamber on the fourth Thursday of the month. The playground the parish council has been raising money for is still short of its target, but the hardwood equipment has already been chosen, waiting for its green.
