The Mallard occupies the old buffet room at Worksop railway station, and it has kept the house rules that come with that: no televisions, no piped music, phones discouraged, children not allowed in at all. Food is limited to cheese and onion or ham rolls, crisps and nuts. It is currently North Notts CAMRA Pub of the Year, and one visitor summed up why: "The quality and range of the beers are absolutely first rate, and The Mallard really knows how to keep beer." Four changing real ales, at least two ciders, foreign bottled beers, country fruit wines and specialist gins, in a room built for waiting for trains.
Across town, the King Edward VII does the opposite of understatement — pool tables, a dart board, live music and quiz nights. It welcomes well-behaved dogs throughout, with water bowls and treats provided, and there's a grassy beer garden with a smoking shelter.
The Lockkeeper sits directly on the Chesterfield Canal towpath and leans family pub: steak and Marston's Pedigree ale pie, a mixed grill, carvery roasts in small, medium or large, sausage rolls, grilled chicken and bacon, plus a kids' play area in the beer garden.
The Lion Hotel, one of the town's oldest hotels, is a coaching inn doing gastropub-style dishes with locally sourced ingredients and superb breakfasts, by reviewers' account. The Station Hotel, opposite the railway station, keeps four regularly changing real ales and has rooms upstairs. The station itself is Grade II listed, served by Northern Trains and East Midlands Railway — Sheffield about twenty-one minutes away, Nottingham closer to an hour and a quarter.
For food to take home, Welbeck Farm Shop runs a butchery counter with, by its own reckoning, more than 120 years of combined experience behind it, selling the estate's own lamb, seasonal game, venison and free-range pork. The outdoor Charter Market runs Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, a right traceable to a royal charter granted by Edward I in 1296.
The Chesterfield Canal towpath — the Cuckoo Way — runs the full 46 miles from Chesterfield to West Stockwith, straight through town. Kiveton Park is just under six miles along it, with a train back if your legs give out; Shireoaks is an easier two and a half, and the Thorpe Salvin Trail adds three more through ancient woodland. Clumber Park, 3,800 acres of parkland, heath and woods with a Cycle Hub and the Lime Tree Avenue, is a short drive south.
Worksop Priory, founded in 1103, still has its twin Norman west towers, though the nave was once nearly three times its current length before the Dissolution in 1539 left it roofless until the 1920s reattached it. Next door, the 14th-century gatehouse has variously been a school, an art gallery and a Citizens Advice Bureau. The Domesday surveyors recorded Werchesope at 24 villagers and 22 freemen, valued at £8 in 1066, dropping to £7 by 1086.
At 24 Blyth Grove, the Straw family moved into an ordinary semi-detached house in 1923 and then, as far as anyone can tell, stopped changing anything. After their mother died in 1939, brothers William Jr and Walter kept the house as it was for the rest of their lives, and when it passed to the National Trust in 1990 it came with some 30,000 everyday objects still in place — a family's ordinary life, preserved by two brothers who saw no reason to move anything.
