Scenic Place in Nottinghamshire

Southwell in Nottinghamshire is a town of considerable distinction centred on one of the finest and most unusual Norman minster churches in England, a building whose architectural quality and the fame of its carved naturalistic foliage in the chapter house have made it a destination of pilgrimage for admirers of medieval architecture since the Victorian period. The town itself, with its surviving Georgian and earlier buildings, its connection with the writer Byron and the remarkable Southwell Workhouse, provides a concentration of cultural interest unusual in a Nottinghamshire market town. Southwell Minster, the cathedral church of the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, is a Norman and Early English building of exceptional quality whose west front with its two tall round-arched towers is among the finest Norman church facades in England. The interior contains excellent work of several medieval periods, but the chapter house, built in the late thirteenth century, is the building's supreme achievement, its walls decorated with carved foliage of almost overwhelming naturalistic quality and variety. The leaves, flowers and plants carved from the local Mansfield stone in the arch mouldings and capitals of the chapter house represent a unique moment in English medieval sculpture, their realistic observation of specific plant species giving them an almost botanical character. The Southwell Workhouse, managed by the National Trust, is the most complete surviving example of a pre-Victorian workhouse in Britain, the building whose design influenced the design of workhouses across England under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The building and its interpretation provide a compelling and sometimes disturbing account of attitudes to poverty in nineteenth-century England.

Laxton in Nottinghamshire is the only village in England to maintain the medieval open field system of communal agriculture, a system of farming in large unenclosed strips that was the standard agricultural arrangement of medieval England before the enclosure movement of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries converted the great majority of agricultural land to the enclosed fields recognisable in the modern English countryside. The continuation of the open field system at Laxton under the management of the Crown Estate provides the only living example of this ancient agricultural tradition in England. The three open fields of Laxton, West Field, South Field and Mill Field, are still farmed in strips by the tenant farmers of the village in a system managed by the Court Leet, the medieval manorial court that continues to meet annually to adjudicate disputes and allocate strips in a continuation of a tradition that has operated on this site for at least 800 years. The Court Leet is the oldest surviving court of its kind in England and its annual meeting provides a direct connection to the medieval agricultural and legal traditions of the English countryside. The visitor centre in the village provides an excellent account of the open field system and the history of Laxton's remarkable survival, and the walking on the field paths provides direct access to the strips and the field boundaries that demonstrate the system in its working form.