Distance: 2.5 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: Easy

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Short countryside walk across mostly flat and even terrain between the railway station at Fiskerton and the historic little cathedral “city” and market town of Southwell.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

The Midlands’ Smallest City?

Informed opinion appears to come down on the side of the argument which says that Southwell, a town of around 7,000 in eastern Nottinghamshire is not a city. There is no record of any authority ever having granted the settlement city status, nor apparently; of the place ever commonly being referred to as a city.

The argument for the defence, that it is a city, points to its large, distinctive, cathedral, which amidst more modern additions and alterations is one of the country’s best preserved from the time of the Norman conquest.

Southwell Minster is the principal ecclesiastical seat for Anglican Christians in Nottinghamshire and a chunk of South Yorkshire. Prior to a church administrative reorganisation in the early 20th Century it also took in much of Derbyshire as well. Today it is the southernmost diocese in the Province of the Archbishop of York, a small northern tongue running down into central England.

The Minster was amongst Nikolaus Pevsner’s favourite buildings in England. In the late 1940s he wrote The Leaves of Southwell about the striking 13th Century carvings in parts of the building, specially the Chapter House. These intricate stone cut creations, chiselled by medieval masons, are currently the subject of a National Lottery Heritage Fund project to restore and better maintain them in future.

As well as being seriously impressive works of art, Southwell Minster’s Leaves are also striking for their secular, or even mystical content. This includes a representation of the green man as well as other not exactly Christian symbols. It is believed that these are a gesture towards and an invocation of the power springs located near to the site of the Chapter House. The springs are understood to have been used in baptism rights, however, despite the area having been comprehensively Christianised hundreds of years before the carvings were crafted, it is entirely possible that some older mystical reverence for them remained.

Southwell Minster was also the location for a key moment in the mid-17th Century Civil Wars. It was where Charles I was arrested by Parliamentarian soldiers in 1646, ending the first phase of the Civil Wars in England. It was during these years that the Archbishop of York’s Palace next door to the Minster was destroyed. It’s ruined great hall stands to this day and can be visited. Other famous residents include Lord Byron who resided in Southwell during University of Cambridge vacations in the early 1800s.

Beyond the Minster’s precincts Southwell is a prosperous midlands market town. In some ways it recalls its West Midlands region counterpart Lichfield, albeit being far smaller and more remote. The town was cut off from the national railway network in the 1960s when the branch line that ran between the mainline that connects Nottingham with Newark and Mansfield, was closed. There is however, a very good bus service between the Southwell and Newark and Nottingham, as well as a station two and a half miles to the south at Fiskerton.

In addition to its ecclesiatical heritage Southwell also played an important, albeit unhappy, role in the development of British social policy. The Reverend John Thomas Becher, who was a senior cleric at Southwell Minster in the early 19th Century, had strong ideas about reforming the Poor Law which had governed how parishes provided relief to those in financial need since the start of the 17th Century.

The system that existed between 1600 and 1834 was moderately redistributive, and operated (crudely speaking) like a form of tax credit or the supplementary benefit system which existed between the 1960s and 1980s. Much of the system was funded by everyday workers who were not usually destitute, but who paid into the system in good months, and withdrew from it in bad ones. However, it was resented by wealthier people because it required them to pay relatively large poor rates out of what they had gouged by various means from those who worked for them.

John Becher’s reformed system, enacted in Southwell in 1824 sought to significantly reduce the cost of supporting those in need by ending the practice of giving claimants cash benefits or support in kind. Instead those seeking relief would be required to take up residence in a “workhouse”, with strict rules and conditions designed to be categorically more unpleasant than any kind of life for a working aged able bodied person outside the institution, where they would be required to work for their keep.

Like simplistic and reactionary minded liberals throughout the modern era John Becher thought that his genius idea would lead ordinary working people to always conclude that they were better off in work and not seeking support, than claiming upon the solidarity of their community in hard times. His set of ideas trialled at Southwell proved very popular amongst similarly minded intellectuals and the rich, being enacted nationwide by a liberal government in 1834.

And of course he was partly right. Hardly any able bodied adults of working age presented themselves at the workhouse, whether at Southwell or anywhere else. Instead those who filled the institution were orphaned children without family who could care for them, widows and women who had in some cases been victims of severe domestic violence and/or sexual assult, the disabled, and elderly people without means or family able to take care of them.

This meant that far from saving money the system rapidly became full of people in serious need who clearly had no recourse – besides destitution and starvation – other than entering the workhouse system. With few able bodied residents of working age to undertake the tasks neccessary to run the site, the Poor Law Union who managed the operation of the system, had little choice other than to massively expand public employment by hiring local people to undertake the caring tasks, manual labour and clerical work necessary to keep the workhouse functioning.

This overarching story, and the story of some of those who ended up in the system is told at Southwell Workhouse, John Becher’s 1824 prototype, which unusually survived more or less intact at the kernel of a suite of later local government institutions. Having been put up for sale by Nottingham County Council in 1997 following the closure of the meals on wheels kitchen which was based in part of the structure, it was purchased by the National Trust who opened it as a museum in 2002.

It is well worth a visit, being fascinating, albeit harrowing. To the National Trust’s credit as well as presenting the story of the workhouse’s 19th Century origins it also takes the story up to the 1970s and 1980s when the buildings were still being used as temporary accommodation for families and as a home for elderly women with nowhere else to go. In this way the visitor can see how the modern welfare state, even at its pinnacle, was constructed upon the material remains, and often residual attitudes, of the Poor Laws.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the gpx. from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps

This short walk to Southwell begins at Fiskerton Railway Station.

Fiskerton Railway Station is served by trains running to and from Newark Castle Railway Station from Nottingham and Derby more or less hourly during the middle part of the day.

From the eastbound platform of Fiskerton Railway Station exit onto the car park adjacent to the platform.

In the car park turn left and walk in the direction of the main road.

Once on the main road turn right and walk away from the station along the road.

The road was fairly busy when I walked the route late on a Saturday morning, so take care.

Follow the road as it slopes slightly uphill passing scattered houses for several hundred metres.

Presently just after crossing a bridge with a tall pylon on the horizon the road begins sloping downhill.

Shortly before you reach the pylon, and a sports club there is a gate on your right on the far side of the road.

Adjacent to it, on the edge of woodland there is a footpath.

Cross over the road and head down this footpath.

After a very short distance it comes out onto a paved lane behind the metal gate.

Walk along this lane.

Soon you reach the entrance of a tip.

Just prior to the gate leading into the tip there is a footpath sign off to your left.

Head down the footpath and walk along it as it weaves through scrubland.

Presently the path crosses an open field around the edge of a horse’s paddock.

Then slopes gently uphill before turning into a green lane.

After walking along the green lane for a bit it runs out into an open field again.

After crossing the field you pass through a gate.

On the other side of the gate the footpath becomes a farm track which steadily becomes a paved lane as you approach the edge of Southwell.

Walk along the paved lane for some distance.

Eventually you round the corner near a small industrial estate and an electricity substation on the edge of the settlement.

Here in some bushes next to the substation on your left there is a footpath sign.

Head down the footpath and along a snicket between some houses.

This leads out onto a main road flanked with houses.

At this point if you turn right it is roughly a five to ten minute walk to the National Trust Workhouse.

To get into the centre of Southwell and the Minster, cross over the road and make for Potwell Close a cul-de-sac on the far side.

Once on the far side walk down Potwell Close which consists of 1960s or 1970s vintage bungalows and semi-detached houses.

At the bottom of the road take a right turn and walk into a garage area.

Here on your left there is a footpath.

Follow this footpath through some trees. Presently it crosses a stream via a concrete footbridge.

Keep straight on the path heading left at a junction.

Then cross down across a metalled path amidst some trees.

On the far side head up a flight of stone steps.

Then step out onto a field.

Here you get your first view of Southwell Minster.

Walk across the field heading towards it.

At the far side of the field follow the line of a wooden fence, then head past two red brick walls.

You are then standing on a main road.

Turn right and walk up the road towards the Minster.

Once level with the Minster head into its grounds.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

It is quite quick and straightforward to walk back to Fiskerton Railway Station from Southwell. However, the number 26 bus run by Nottingham City Council’s publicly owned bus company (as of February 2022) operates a half hourly service on weekdays and Saturdays between Newark and Nottingham via Southwell. This offers the opportunity of heading either east to Newark or to the large village of Lowdham where there is a station on the Nottingham Newark line. It is also possible to get the bus straight to the centre of Nottingham, from where trains to Sheffield, London, Leicester, Derby and Birmingham can be caught.