The Nottinghamshire settlements that have been lost and forgotten over time

Britain’s ancient island story is a continuing succession of rises and falls. 

Great tribes and warlords have ruled their realms and kingdoms, only to lose their grip of power to outside conquerors or self-dissolution. 

The invading armies of empires, covetous neighbours and dictatorships have battered the shores of the island and been beaten back, or settled and been absorbed into the great historic fabric of the islands. And, too, with time, whole villages and towns have risen and fallen. 

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Whether through annihilation by disease, war or famine, or through the pure ruthless indulgence of landowners clearing settlements that really spoilt the scenery, Britain is a huge graveyard for thousands of villages and towns.

There are no gravestones. But there are records. Some of the most ancient records in English history in fact, including medieval tax reports, maps, and of course the Domesday Book of 1086.

Today these are all digitised and searchable. But the arduous job of finding and compiling the many thousands of lost settlements of Britain was first approached in the late 1960s well before modern tech tools were available.

That momentous task was taken up by historians Maurice Beresford and John Hurst. The results of their labours was a book published in 1971, Deserted Medieval Villages, detailing the many hamlets, villages and towns lost in the sands of time.

Nottinghamshire has its list, of around 70 lost or relocated settlements. And it contains names that are somehow familiar yet also ghostly and mysterious.

There is the lost village of Whimpton, close to the river at Dunham-on-Trent. Underneath what is now a protected archeological site there is evidence of former homesteads, a church, enclosures, furrows and moats, even the abandoned village green. 

Whimpton appears in the Domesday book, and in records up until the 15th century. But by the mid-16th century, the village had disappeared.

There is the hamlet of Farworth in north Notts, lost forever to an outrageous land clearance by a wealthy owner. 

When the owner of Serleby Hall, which still stands on the same site, bought the estate in the late 1730s, there was just one problem: the locals. But the 1st Viscount Galway was determined to have his rural retreat. And in one ruthless swoop, he found a solution. He simply cleared the surrounding land, dismantled the builders, and evicted the villagers. 

Nothing now remains of Farworth but historical records and the ghost of a hamlet somewhere in the grounds of Serleby Hall.

Some of these are well known. Some live on as names of rural interest. 

We can only presume that the village of Fleecethorpe, listed by Beresford and Hurst, became the little woodland that is Fleecethorpe Spinney in Bassetlaw. Just as the nearby erstwhile village of Grimston Hill, listed in the Domesday Book as Grimestune, is now nothing more than a small hill of the same name.

Others live on because they have been relocated to their current sites. When the Black Death struck England in the 14th century, it did not spare the village of Bingham. So, the surviving locals simply upped sticks and relocated to a nearby site, where the new village they founded still stands today.

But still more exist now in the records of their absence. The ghosts of villages and hamlets swallowed up by time, by greed, or by the cruel whims of nature.