Newark and Sherwood includes more than eighty villages and hamlets, each with its own particular charm. It is impossible to describe them all in detail, although our Gazetteer gives some interesting details about many of them.

Many of our villages have played an important part in the history of England. The village of East Stoke was the scene of the final great conflict in the War of the Roses. Winthorpe, a village near Newark, was a Parliamentarian centre during the Civil War.

A number of villages in Newark and Sherwood are historically associated with important people. Examples include the village of Elston with the Darwin family and the village of Rolleston with the Victorian writer and illustrator, Kate Greenaway. Was it Rolleston that she thought about when she wrote and illustrated the sweet little rhyme “The Little London Girl”?

Oh, I’ll stay in the country, and make a daisy chain, and never go back to London again

Villages also have their own quirky charm. Take, for example, the pretty hamlet of Kersall with its Best Kept Phone Box in the world, or Maplebeck, home of the Beehive Inn, one of the country’s smallest pubs.

In Blidworth, on the first Sunday in February, the baby boy baptised in the Church, nearest to that date, is rocked in a beautiful flower-decked cradle at a special ‘Rocking’ ceremony.

When visitors arrive in the village of Laxton, they will discover it is the only village in England, which still practises the medieval system of Open Field Farming, a system once used widely throughout England.  Also, in Laxton, you will find the Holocaust Centre, Museum and Gardens, where the history and implications of the Holocaust are sensitively explored in a two-acre setting.

In the village of Cromwell, north of Newark, you will find Vina Cooke's Museum of Dolls and Bygone Childhood.  Rooms in the 17th century rectory are filled with a large collection of dolls, prams and costumes. 

One of our unique villages is the village of Hockerton and its Hockerton Housing Project. This is the UK’s first earth sheltered, self-sufficient ecological housing development. The beautiful site has seen the return of a wide variety of wildlife and has quite rightly received great publicity from the media.