When a big Aegir is forecast, people gather at West Stockwith Basin, often at unreasonably early hours, to watch a wave go past. The Trent Aegir can run up to five feet high, a tidal bore that needs a tide over 8.5 metres at Hull, no floodwater, and no wind — conditions demanding enough to explain why anyone bothers. The Basin is one of the best spots to see it; Gainsborough, Morton, East Stockwith and Owston Ferry are the others.
That's the Trent side of the village. The Basin itself is the terminus of the Chesterfield Canal, opened in 1777 and running 46 miles back to Chesterfield — one of the last canals designed by James Brindley, who died before it was finished. It's a marina now, full of river cruisers and narrowboats, and the towpath leaving from here, the Cuckoo Way, will take you the whole 46 miles if you fancy it. The Trent Valley Way starts at the same spot.
The White Hart sits on the riverbank opposite the parish church, by the main car park, and is the tap for the Idle Brewery next door — Diamond, Promise and Pup, plus a rotating fourth usually a porter or stout. Brian Cooper took the pub over with his wife in 2012 and refurbished it throughout; he brews solely for the White Hart now.
There's a homemade cheeseburger for £6.95, haddock and chips, a steak pie with chips and veg, curry night on Tuesdays and pie night on Wednesdays. A fire burns in winter, and regulars rate the staff highly, though at least one dog owner came away less impressed, so the dog-friendly billing is worth testing on your own terms.
Down at the marina, the Waterfront Inn does double duty: the Canal Side Cafe and Tea Room by day, a pub with rooms by night, garden looking out over the basin. Steak pie again, or Hunters Chicken, or an afternoon tea with sausage rolls and homemade quiche. It keeps rooms and glamping pods, plus moorings for boaters waiting out the tide.
Between the two pubs and the Yacht Club, the village has three places to drink now. It once had more than eleven, most run out of cottage front rooms.
St Mary the Virgin's went up in 1722, on the site of a shipyard, paid for by a shipwright named William Huntington, who left £740 in his will for a chapel and ten almshouses for the widows of local mariners and ship carpenters.
Pevsner, writing it up later, called West Stockwith "a specially pretty... west bank Trent riverside village of brick, of almost Dutch character... an inland port," which is about as much praise as he tends to hand out.
Gainsborough Lea Road station is four miles off, hourly trains toward Sheffield and Lincoln, and the 97 bus runs from Gainsborough through Misterton most days. There's a campsite by the marina too, Waterfront Country Park, with an orchard corner called Dingle Dell.
None of that matters much once you're here. What matters more is the Water Lanes, the old lanes that still run down from the main street to the Trent, and the ferry that used to cross to East Stockwith, directly opposite in Lincolnshire, before it stopped and left the two villages looking at each other across the water.
