Upton Hall keeps the original GPO Speaking Clock in a glass case, next to the watch Captain Scott was wearing when he died on the return from the South Pole in 1912. Both are part of the Museum of Timekeeping, run out of the hall by the British Horological Institute — a 72-room neoclassical mansion with a domed roofline, open Fridays, 10.30am to 3.30pm. The Clock House tea room sits next door for anyone who wants a pot of tea before or after.
Below the hall on Main Street is the Cross Keys, the only pub left in a village that once had two — its old rival, the French Horn, closed in 2005 and is a five-bedroom house now. Colourwashed brick, sash windows, a pantile roof, Grade II listed. Neil and Joy run it; Neil cooks the Sunday roast and the stone-baked pizzas, and CAMRA credits a French chef with making fish the kitchen's particular strength. There's a beer garden to the rear, four rotating real ales, a book club, dominoes and darts. Dogs and wellies are welcome, and it's rumoured to be haunted. There's no shop or bakery in the village any more — the old shop is a private house — so the Cross Keys and the Clock House do most of the work.
St Peter and St Paul's church has a 13th-century arcade of clustered columns and a Perpendicular tower. An 1889 account describes it as "crowned by eight pinnacles, and having in the centre a lofty master pinnacle which rises above its neighbours" — locally, "the glory of the church." A small room partway up, with its own fireplace, once housed a chantry priest, later a dovecote.
Walk 26 leaves from the museum car park and climbs Micklebarrow Hill just outside the village — "the highest point for a long way looking south and east," with views over the Trent Valley as far as the spire of Newark's market-square church. It's a 3.5-mile loop through fields, orchards and woodland. Southwell, two miles away, has the Minster and the National Trust's old workhouse. Fiskerton and Bleasby, the nearest stations, reach Nottingham, Lincoln and Grantham; the village sits on the A612.
The name means what it looks like — Upton, the higher settlement, on a rise above the Trent Valley. That position cost something in the Civil War, with Royalist Newark and Parliamentarian Nottingham on either side of it: Jane Kitchen, a widow, was village constable in 1644, managing provisions for troops passing through.
James Tennant, later mineralogist to Queen Victoria and the man who supervised the recutting of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, was born in Upton in 1808 to the Kitchen family — the same family as Jane the constable. More recently the village produced Fiona Thornewill, who skied alone and unaided to the South Pole in 42 days after losing her satellite navigation ten days in, and the broadcaster Siân Welby, who grew up here.
The village green keeps its apple trees, and a Grade II-listed K6 telephone box still stands nearby. Once a year, half a dozen local artists open their front rooms to strangers for Open Studios Notts, which feels about right for a village that's been showing people the time, one way or another, for the better part of thirty years.
