Woodborough’s Heritage

Woodborough, a Sherwood Forest Village, recorded in Domesday

St Swithun. The best piece is the chancel, built in the mid C14. It is wide and high and receives its light from a large five-light east window with the wildest of flowery tracery, and three-light north and south windows with ogee-reticulated tracery. In the east gable an additional triangular window with curved sides and flowing tracery which leads into the roof. Inside to the left and right of the east window brackets for statues. The Piscina a little ogee-niche into which a short filleted shaft reaches up (a combination of the shaft and the niches type). The Sedilia must be new. Big west tower, C13 below (see tower arch) perpendicular above. The arcades of the nave also perpendicular of the usual Notts type. The oldest feature of the church is the north door: Norman, of three orders, with colonnettes with scalloped capitals and cable and zig-zag mouldings of voussoirs. – Font. Also Norman, of the usual tub-shape, but decorated with crosses at top and bottom and three rows of zig-zags between. – Communion table. Given by John Wood, Recorder of Newark, that is after 1660 (but probably of Jacobean date). – Choir stalls. Carved by Mansfield Parkyns, mid-C19 owner of The Hall. – Stained glass. Early C14 tracery panels in the chancel south side windows (Agony in the garden, Sleeping Disciples (?), Noli me tangere, Doubting Thomas) and in one north side window (St Catherine and St Margaret). In the east window, mostly by Kempe, 1897, a cherub. – Window of 1910 by Morris & Co., north side of chancel, with saints and prophets, to a Burne-Jones design; the Virgin and Child by J.H. Dearle.

Woodborough Hall, at the west end of the village. Built c.1660-70 for Philip Lacock to replace an earlier house of the Strelley family made square and Tudor c.1850 for Mansfield Parkyns. The oldest and best feature is the fine well staircase with a scrolled foliage balustrade and carved pots of flowers on each newel (cf. Thrumpton). On the landing the main door is enriched; the others have carved pierced and wooden fanlights, in the drawing room an elaborate pilastered two-tier fireplace (its segmental pediment and coat of arms have been removed). Simpler, probably restored, two-tier fireplaces in the staircase hall, dining room and study downstairs. In the dining room a sideboard by Mansfield Parkyns (cf. the choir stalls in the church).

Hall Farmhouse. With a plaque under the ivy that reads ‘Philip Lacock Esquire 1710’. Brick, three-storey, with two gables and a central gabled porch.

Another framework-knitting village, but with fewer remains than nearby Calverton. At the junction of High Street [Main Street] and Shelt Hill a group of two-storey cottages with ground-floor knitters’ windows. Further west, a first-floor workshop at the rear of No. 117 High Street [Main Street]. Opposite, a row formerly with many long ground-floor windows, now completely modernised.

Fox Wood, one mile northwest. A small oval hill-fort, one of a group on the southern fringes of Sherwood Forest. Bivallate, the defences well preserved on the north and west sides. The site presumably dates from the Iron Age, but there has as yet been no orderly excavation here. Roman finds, including a stone building, have been made in the interior, so that occupation of this hill-top may have been prolonged.


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The Buildings of England - Woodborough by Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) 2nd Edition 1979



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