The layout of Kings Clipstone has probably altered little in 1000 years. The 1630 map of the village shows it to be remarkably similar to the present day village with the houses strung out along the road between the Castle Field and the Great Pond. Most of the dwellings lay to the north of the road with plots running down to the river.

It would never have been easy to make a living from the poor sandy soil. The villagers of 1630 would have had important rights to use the forest. However, most of the forest around the village destroyed during the mid 17^th century to produce charcoal for the iron forges.  The second half of the 18^th century saw the enclosure of 2000 acres of open land.  The 1832 directory described the village as being in a sad state, one of the worst in Bassetlaw. 

This map is based on the 1630 map translated on to modern map. The village still looked the same on maps right up to 1800.

As part of his irrigation scheme, the Duke of Portland demolished most of the houses on the side of the village nearest the Maun and replaced them with a model village. The semi-detached houses had a large paddock each, so that the residents, who worked on the estate, could be more self-sufficient. By 1842 the description of the village had changed to ‘ being in danger of becoming one of the neatest’. At this time the whole village was part of the Duke’s Welbeck Estate.

 The village in 2006 and the points of interest on the trail.

1. Castle Field (Manor Garth)

For over 200 years the palace was the main royal residence in the area and all the Plantagenet kings, Henry II, Richard I, John, Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, and Richard II, stayed for weeks or even months at a time. Ideally situated at the heart of ancient Sherwood, and only a day’s ride from Nottingham, they could enjoy the pleasures of the beautiful countryside and rich hunting away from the main palaces.

The earliest remains found in Castle Field, or Manor Garth as it was called on the1630 map, are Roman. Later, it became a saxon and then a royal manor. The Plantagenet kings then transformed the buildings into a royal palace. Records from 1164 – 65, during the reign of Henry II, first mention the Kings’s House at Clipstone, when £20 was spent on the property.

This would have been an excellent position situated as it was on the high ground above the River Maun with the Great Pond of Clipstone to the east. The site would have been fairly secure and very pleasant.   The palace must have been an impressive building by April 1194, when Richard I (the Lionheart) selected it as the place to welcome William the Lion, King of Scotland for his state visit.  Stone fragments found in the field show carving of a high standard.

The palace, built of stone was gradually extended by successive generations. Some of these additions were large and expensive. In 1279 Edward I added two chambers with chapels costing £435 12s 6d, a huge amount. Two years later he built stables for 200 horses at a cost of £104 8s 5d.  In 1348/49 money was spent on the rebuilding of the knights’ chamber and the repair of the great hall, the queen’s hall, the king’s kitchen, the queen’s kitchen, the great chamber, Rosamund’s chamber, Robert de Mauley’s chamber, the treasurer’s chamber, the chamber of Lionel, the king’s son, the great chapel, the chapel next to the king’s chamber, the king’s long stable, and the great gateway.

The ‘King’s Houses’ was very much a Plantagenet palace. When the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, deposed Richard II in 1399, he sowed the seeds of the unrest that plagued England for the next 86 years as Yorkist and Lancastrians battled for supremacy.  Henry IV, Henry V & Henry VI continued to maintain the building and made some additions. The palace, never a castle but a fortified house, would have been secure enough in times of relative peace but the turbulence of the 15^th century would have made it a very insecure. No monarch was ever again recorded as using it so it is not surprising that it fell into a state of disrepair. It was not until the accession of Henry VII, after the battle of Bosworth in 1485, that peace returned.

A survey of 1525 recorded ‘great dekay & ruyne’. New work like building chimneys had been started but not finished and much of the building had no roof. By 1568 the palace is being described as ‘site of the late castle’.

2. The series of bends at the western end of the village is called the ‘Rat-Hole’. The bends date back to at least 1630 when they appear on William Senior’s map. The name derives from the days before the motorcar when the road was only just wide enough for a single horse and cart. Should two met there would be much arguing and cursing as one was forced to back down the twisting hill.

3. Squires Cottage Looking down Gorsethorpe Lane, the small cottage on the left is very old, whether it is the cottage that appears on William Senior’s 1630 map of the village is not certain although it would most likely have been built of timber on stone foundations.

4. The Iron Chapel, situated behind you was erected in 1903 by the Duke to provide a venue for Church of England services. Prior to this the services had been held at Cavendish Lodge, then Archway Lodge. With a design life of about 20 to 30 years it is not surprising that these ’tin tabernacles’ are becoming very rare. The photo shows the silver jubilee celebrations for George V.

5. The Crofts, on either side of Gorsethorpe Lane are the crofts erected about 1840 following the demolition of most of the 1630 village to make way for the Flood Dykes. The bricked up windows actually lie across the party wall and were intended as a decorative feature. To ensure his workers could feed themselves, each croft had a half-acre paddock attached.

left

Charles and Mary Emma Brammer outside Croftside circa 1920

Below

Charles and Emma with their family outside Croftside circa 1910

6. Maun Cottage

Looking east along Main Road, the road has to swing out to get round Maun Cottage. For much of the 19^th century until 1889 it was the Fox and Hounds Inn and may have been the Gate Inn even earlier. Inside Maun cottage and Brammer Farm House are very thick stone walls shown on the 1630 map, that are thought to have been part of the great gateway for the palace.

During the early part of the 20^th century it became Gill’s shop. The picture shows the building about 1915.

7. Bradley’s Garage 

The photo taken in 1960 shows the core of the village. John Bradley ran his haulage business from the garage. The tipper truck can just be seen on the forecourt of the garage. The picture below shows Harry Sprigg with his tipper truck on the forecourt about 1958.

The modern houses were built in 2004.

8. Brammer Farmhouse was named after James Brammer who rented any spare land from the estate to gradually build up his farm. Shops were held in the premises on and off for four generations of the same family. Elizabeth Jepson, James’s mother-in-law became a baker/confectioner for the village in 1859 when her husband Robert was injured by a runaway horse on the estate. The 4^th Duke provided her with a bread oven and gleaning rights to his fields, all she needed to earn a living for herself and her eleven children. The photo (left) shows Emma Brammer (right) outside Brammer Farm about 1915.

The portrait on the right is not a colour photo but a tinted black and white print of James and Hannah Brammer (about 1900).

9. Holly Tree is a bungalow that is built over the remains of Rose Cottage, a possible survivor from the 1630 map and described in 1844 as an old farmhouse. Its well certainly predates all the other wells in the village.

10. Keepers Bothy takes its name from the wooden building that stood on the site before the bungalow was built. The bothy was used to house the young gamekeepers in the days when all the land around was part of the Duke’s shooting estate.

11. The Wesleyan Chapel was built in 1832 by public subscription, the Duke providing the land.  The odd thing about this photo is the 2 barrels on the road outside. Methodists were noted for their temperance. The chapel closed in November 1978.

12. Rauceby is the last property on the other side of Main Road and was previously three separate one up and one down cottages. It may be a property shown on William Senior’s map of 1630 although it is more likely that it had been built on the same foundations.  

The picture shows John Allcock (1848- 1918) with his scythe outside Rauceby, circa 1915.  John had been foreman at Broomhill Grange.

13. The kennels is the last house on this side of the road. The Duke of Portland was a keen huntsman and Clipstone Park was managed to provide good sport, not only for himself but also for the King who used to visit, taking it back to its early beginnings in 1180.  The photo was taken on a wintry morning with snow on the ground circa 1930.

The property was surrounded by a high fence to keep the dogs in. The actual kennels were the next group of buildings. And on the front corner of the first building there appears to be a section of a stone building that probably appeared on the 1630 map. Behind the property was the pheasantry where thousands of pheasant were reared for the shoot.

In the garden can be seen one of the original sluice gates that controlled the flow of water into the irrigation channels for the water meadow behind.

13. The site of the Great Pond of Clipstone, Just the other side of the road was an embankment that enclosed the Great Pond of Clipstone. The Pond and its mills were very ancient, the earliest reference to them being between 1176 and 1180 when Richard I had repairs carried out. The pond was over half a mile long, stretching back as far as Waterfield Farm. As well has holding water for the mills, the pond was an important fishery for the palace. During one royal visit in December 1315, 100 pike and 1,600 roach were taken from the pond to feed the royal household. It was drained sometime between 1754 and the building of the Flood Dyke irrigation system after 1819.

The 4^th Duke of Portland (1809-1854) was a man of considerable ability. A leading farmer, he retained and supervised a large proportion of his vast estate. He gained a lot of popularity for the construction of the first sewage works in England at Clipstone Park Farm. The 1,487 acre farm was only bringing in £346 per year. The Duke wished to increase the number of sheep on the estate but a shortage of winter feed was proving a problem. The solution was water meadows. After smaller trials at Clumber, Thoresby and Welbeck, he began the conversion of the wastelands at Clipstone into the famous Flood-Dyke system. Accounts on the ‘water-meadows at Clipstone’ are to be found in the first journal of the Royal Agricultural Society.

Work was found for hundreds of unemployed soldiers, along with navvies. The irrigated meadows extended from Carr Bank Wood in Mansfield to the boundary between Edwinstowe and Ollerton. The dykes were 7¹/₂ miles long and watered 300 acres. Kings Mill reservoir was constructed to supply water in the summer, and to increase fertility, the Duke arranged for Mansfield’s sewage to be discharged via the Maun into the Flood Dyke. Built between 1819 and 1837 the total cost was just under £40,000. It was estimated that the Duke made £3600 a year from the scheme, close to a 10% return. The sluice at site 11 controlled the water flowing into the Flood Dyke from Vicar Water so that the Dog & Duck water meadow could be flooded as necessary. This area was also used for allotments for the villagers.

 Below   Bog Lane gardens and the water meadow behind the Dog & Duck circa 1950

During the 1930s mining subsidence altered the levels in the dykes and electric pumps had to be introduced to keep the system functioning. The system finally closed in the 1960s when further subsidence rendered them unusable. The flood dyke ran along the northern side of the road and then turned down Archway road.

14. The Dog and Duck was built at some stage between 1785 and 1819. It was probably towards the end of the period, when the road towards Ollerton was improved shortly after the Napoleonic Wars by building an embankment across the remains of the Great Pond. Directly behind the Dog & Duck on the other side of the railway was Clipstone Warrens, a large area of heath land inhabited by hundreds of rabbits. The next two photos show the coronation procession outside the pub in 1953. Charlie Simpson’s tractor has a crown fixed to the front and ‘God Save Queen’ on the board above.

 Below - The float behind Charlie’s tractor.

Right

‘Whitey’ with Mrs Pollett  outside the Dog & Dog. ‘Whitey’ was the icecream man selling his own icecream from the horse and cart. The horse’s rump can just be seen of the left.

15. The cottages, Archway Road

The bunting on the cottages was for the silver jubilee of George V in 1935. The cottage with the open doorway became the shop which was kept by Mrs Whitlam in her front room from 1936 till 1941 when she retired aged 68.

The photo shows Sarah Jane Whitlam, Kit and Kathleen outside the shop about 1938.

The cottages predated 1832 and the arrangement of the cottages inside was far from straight forward, with the bedroom of one over the kitchen of another and similar peculiarities.

Beat, shown below, lived in Archway cottages and was one of the characters of the village. She arrived at Eastfield Farm on 8^th October 1914 as Miss Beatrice Nellie Houghton, an agricultural worker in the first Women’s Land army. Known as ‘Beat’ she dressed in Bedfordshire whipcord breaches, canvas gaiters and boots, a green smock and a broad brimmed hat, very practical clothes for her job.

During the First World War she worked from 6am to 6pm for 15s 0d a week. In 1947 she still started at 6am and earned the grand total of £3 8s 0d. She could tackle most jobs including ploughing with a horse. She did however draw the line at carrying bags of corn, not surprising as they weighed in at 16 to 18 stone.  

Beat dressed as a clown, villagers held a Glee or Pierrot Club at the Iron Chapel in the 1930’s. Even quite staid members of the community admitted to owning a clown costume

The photo below was taken in 1934 when Beat won a ploughing match against all male competitors.  Beat’s family lived in Archways Cottages for close on 90 years. Beat’s manly costume was the norm and practical for her job. On one village outing she scared young Peter Wilson, her bosses young son, by wearing more feminine clothes.