Tuxford

Windmill, Main Street and the Sun

Tuxford Windmill still grinds its own flour, and the mill shop sells it stone-ground, alongside a bakery and a tearoom that started small and got bigger once people worked out it was there. It's open Thursday to Sunday, with tours on open days.

The rest of Tuxford runs off a broad main street, its buildings pulled in close on both sides — a coaching-town habit, built for stagecoaches rather than cars. The A1 cuts straight through the middle and splits the town in two, which the Georgian brick either side doesn't seem especially bothered about.

The Sun Inn is the more workaday of the two pubs, all horseshoe bar, pool room and darts, with letting rooms upstairs. The two handpumps mostly sit unused — John Smiths Smooth is what people actually drink — but a visiting beer blogger singled out the Guinness: "the best Guinness I've had in years, actually tasting of something," and noted a regular who started singing unprompted. Dogs are welcome.

Coaching Inns and the Horse Museum

The Fountain Hotel, a former coaching house on Lincoln Road, does the fuller pub menu — a-la-carte, Sunday lunch, homemade pies, ribeye steak, a pizza list, cheesecake for pudding — with herbs and vegetables grown in its own garden. It's rated the best of Tuxford's eight restaurants on Tripadvisor, and reviewers mention getting change from a £20 note.

The Newcastle Arms, on Market Place, stopped being a pub in the 2000s and stood derelict long enough to become the thing everyone in town complained about. Sally and John Mitchell bought it at auction in 2011 and restored it; it's now Sally Mitchell's Gallery and, since 2014, the Museum of the Horse — eight rooms of equestrian objects going back to around 600 BC. Margaret Tudor slept on this site in 1503, at the Crown Inn that stood here before it, on her way north to marry James IV of Scotland.

Market Place Food and Medieval Stone

Greens & Deli, on Market Place, does homemade sausage rolls and a Sunday carvery, with rooms above if you want to stay the night over the counter.

St Nicholas' Church is Grade I listed, a 12th-century core with a chancel rebuilt around 1495. Its font is dated 1662; the elaborate wooden cover suspended above it is dated 1673, eleven years younger than the font it protects.

School Rules, Fire and Brick

Read's Grammar School opened in 1669; one of its rules fined any boy sixpence for skipping his turn sweeping the schoolhouse on a Saturday. It closed in the 1910s and is now the public library. Domesday recorded 34 households and a mill worth ten shillings and seven pence, the whole place valued at £8 in 1086, down from £10 twenty years earlier.

A fire in September 1702 destroyed around 120 buildings, and the town was rebuilt in the brick that still stands. Daniel Defoe passed through soon after and coined the name that stuck — Tuxford in the Clays, for the heavy soil underneath it.

Trail, Transport and Local Food

The 32-mile Dukeries Trail, linking Sherwood Forest's old estates, passes through town. Retford, the nearest railway station, is seven miles off, about nineteen minutes on the hourly 37 bus; Newark is fourteen miles the other way.

None of this explains why a market town on Nottinghamshire clay ended up with a museum devoted entirely to horses, but it did, and on a slow Tuesday the woman behind the counter at the Country Victualler, Alison Maloney, will tell you, unprompted, that Harrods buys its Christmas hams from her.