Great expectations

Jonathan Manning traces the ancient Great North Road, delving into the East Midlands’ rich history and beautiful landscapes

Centuries before sat-navs, travellers would navigate north from London to York or Edinburgh with the guidance of only the most rudimentary maps. These displayed a single line, marking each mile and the names of the settlements through which it passed. Anywhere even slightly off route simply didn’t feature. There was no colour-coding of major and minor roads to assist stagecoach drivers; they simply pointed their horses north and cracked the whip.

This tour follows a similarly straightforward route along the course of the old Great North Road from Cambridgeshire through Lincolnshire to Nottinghamshire. 

A more accurate map would note its proximity to the East Coast Main Line, visiting towns and cities that will be familiar to many only as muffled announcements over a station speaker. It’s a journey that is less about getting off the beaten track, and more about stopping along the track to explore the attractions, rich history and beautiful landscapes of the East Midlands.

Nene dream

Easton Walled Garden © F Cholmeley

First stop is the ever-popular Ferry Meadows Club Campsite, nestled in a vast country park of wildlife-rich lakes and huge open spaces, bordered by the River Nene.

With two golf courses, a watersports centre and half a dozen pubs within walking distance, this is a site where handbrakes can be pulled on and car keys stowed. And if shanks’s pony is feeling weary, campers can hop aboard a local bus service or heritage railway line into the heart of Peterborough.

Feeling energetic, I pedal through the park, past a rowing lake, and follow the Nene into the city centre, where a deluge scuppers my initial plan and I divert to Peterborough Museum (free entry). Its exhibits and storyboards rewind to prehistoric times, when this whole area was a waterland, patrolled by giant fish measuring up to 16m in length. Display cabinets include the fossilised skeletons of a vicious-looking Steneosaurus crocodile, and a heavily built pliosaur, perhaps three metres long, with the teeth marks of a predator in its skull. Wild swimming would have been a risky business 160 million years ago!

The water has been in retreat since the 18th century, when engineers dug ditches and dykes and used windmills to pump water into rivers, claiming the rich, black soils for agriculture. A pair of posts sunk at Holme Fen in 1848 now stand several metres proud of the land, exposing how drainage initiatives have shrunk the peat, creating the lowest point in the UK, almost three metres below sea level.

Contours are few and far between on the drive north, past the beautiful Georgian town of Stamford, home to Burghley House and definitely worth a visit. 

My next stop is Wagtail Country Park, an Affiliated Site (AS) close to Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace of Grantham. The site has a bar with weekend entertainment, and two lakes generously stocked with barbel, carp, roach, rudd and tench.

Bomber County

Belton House ©National Trust Images/Megan Taylor

Site manager Sue shows me detailed spreadsheets that list the abundant attractions in the local area, from stately homes and castles to pubs, restaurants and takeaways.

There were once so many airfields in this area that Lincolnshire was known as Bomber County and the RAF was nicknamed the Royal Lincolnshire Airforce. Even today, RAF Coningsby has a viewing area from which you can watch Typhoons take off and land, while the Red Arrows are based at RAF Waddington. Be sure to visit the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight visitor centre at Coningsby, which offers guided tours taking in six Spitfires, a pair of Hurricanes and the last airworthy Lancaster in the UK.

Keen to keep my feet on the ground,  I head to the National Trust’s Belton Estate, where there are fabulous walks through the 1,300 acres of parkland and stunning formal gardens. When our children were younger, we would spend hours here in the woodland adventure playground, with its fort and treetop runways – an end-of-trip bribe for behaving respectfully during a tour of art-rich Belton House. These days the bribes are more likely to involve cappuccino and cake – at the risk of sounding blasphemous, the best are not at the National Trust tearoom, but across the road in Belton Garden Centre, which boasts a mouthwatering selection of bakes.

Appetite sated, I continued in a north-westerly direction towards Milestone Caravan Park Affiliated Site. A great place to stop along the way – especially for keen anglers and wildlife lovers – would be Hawton Waters Certificated Location (CL), where the grass pitches gaze out over a 14-acre fishing lake.

‘Stone's throw

Milestone Caravan Park by member Allan Brown

Milestone AS has an ace up its sleeve: the Milestone Brewery & Taproom immediately next door.

A variety of upmarket street-food vendors pop up in the evenings at the brewery, while the US-style OK Diner (within walking distance) is another good option if you don’t fancy cooking. 

A bus from the site’s entrance takes you into Newark-on-Trent, where the walls

of a once formidable castle dominate the river. Above streets blessed with an impressive smattering of independent shops, the upper floors reveal a handsome range of Tudor, Georgian and Victorian architecture, while red and white canopies cover Newark Royal Market.

Just down the road at Newark Showground, a huge antiques fair takes place every two months. Hundreds of stalls sell a mind-blowing selection of treasures, with every chance of coming across a stuffed bear or highly polished deep-sea diver’s helmet amid the gleaming silverware and iconic advertising signs.

Far more sobering is the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, about 10 miles from Milestone, which not only remembers the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, but seeks to “grow a community of ‘critical thinkers’ right across society, able to question the misinformation, stereotypes and conspiracy theories which are driving today’s racist hate”.

Personal video testimonies of Holocaust survivors roll on a loop alongside photographs and films from the 1930s and 1940s. 

By individualising the horrors, the museum overcomes the danger of number blindness associated with statistics so shocking they seem unimaginable. Outside, small plaques in the memorial rose garden give moving voice to the friends and relatives of the victims. 

Few museums carry such impact.

Trails and tunnels

Clumber Park Lake by member Vicky Quigley

Farther to the north, a magnificent three-mile double avenue of lime trees in Clumber Park leads campers to the final destination of this tour, Clumber Park Club Campsite.

“It’s all absolutely lovely,” says Jill, walking back to her campervan after a day spent exploring Clumber’s trails with her two dogs.

She’s been so struck by the park that she dives into her pocket to fish out her phone and show me a photo that she took earlier. It’s not of the 4,000-acre estate, its ancient woodland, wildlife, or light dancing on its beautifully-landscaped lake. The photo frames a quote by Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, on the wall of the park’ s Discovery Centre: “We all want quiet. We all want beauty. We all need space,” it says, perfectly summing up why so many of us love touring.

Similar themes are evident in the Ice Age rock art found at Creswell Crags, just up the road from Clumber Park, where images of bison, reindeer and birds adorn the walls.

A series of caves and fissures split the sides of the dramatic limestone gorge, providing a treasure trove of artefacts for archaeologists, including mammoth bones and a hyena skull, as well as flint and stone tools. An easy 20-minute walk heads through the gorge to the Welbeck Estate, where there’s a good café, a sublime farm shop, the Portland Collection Museum (free entry), which displays the paintings (including a Michelangelo drawing), tapestries and treasures of the Dukes of Portland, and the Harley Gallery of contemporary art.

An exhibition at the gallery explores the life of the eccentric 5th Duke of Portland, who apparently insisted on wearing three pairs of socks, only ate roast chicken, and communicated with the outside world via letters through his bedroom door. There’s more reliable truth in his construction projects, which included almost three miles of tunnels, lending strength to the rumours that he was the inspiration for Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows.

Mr Badger’s friend Toad not only owned a shiny, new caravan, painted canary yellow, with red and green wheels, but also issued a rallying call that resonates to this day for Club members: “The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!”