Tales from Watnall Hall

"Skinner" Hancox - Watnall's Waterloo hero and Col Rolleston's son-in-law

Watnall's turnpike road - how remote-feeling was Watnall back in the olden days?

Dating DH Lawrence's story "A Fragment of Stained Glass" to precisely 1538-39

Sept 11th 1926 - DH Lawrence celebrates birthday in the exotic Far East (that's Mablethorpe to you and me!) before his final visit to Eastwood

Scanning Lady Maud Rolleston's well-travelled sketchbook from c.1900

Under threat - RAF Watnall's secret bunker and its restored twin caught on video

RAF Watnall's pop-up wartime "swimming pool" and naked WW2 ace Dizzy Allen

Watnall Hall - the Norway connection

Lord Byron the boxer - his road rage incident in Venice

The lost local watering holes of Robin Hood and Mellors, the gamekeeper of Lady Chatterley...

Sex, drugs and RAF Watnall - the comforts of love, beer and benzedrine wakey-wakey pills...

Watnall Solar Farm - A short walk from coal to solar, how far have we come?...

The Watnall in colonial Australia, its wild-west Aboriginal wars of the 1840s under "Sheriff" Rolleston and his link to Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Luddites pay a visit to Gilt Hill

Watnall Park - Severed bough of a thousand memories

Lt. Sidney Rolleston, the Notts Naval cricket connection and his mysterious Watnall funeral

Lady Maud's father, his bloody bayoneting at Sebastopol and the Arboretum cannons

Lady Maud and the Kimberley Diamond Mine

Mysterious DH Lawrence Windmill Watercolour

Newstead's precious antique "grates" were from Watnall Hall

Watnall's Bleak Midwinter Miners' Strike of 1908 - Colonel Rolleston steps in

Eastwood's 1773 polar explorer - Mr. Benjamin Drawwater, Royal Navy surgeon and Captain Cook's life-saving medic

The cook, the footman, the yachting set and Sir Lancelot's binoculars

Nottingham's Grand Designs - building the Council House, County Hall's huge Italian bell-tower and the art deco warehouses of the Trent

Byron's Princess Diana-like funeral procession to his Hucknall vault and the "Nottingham Goths"

Greasley church's saddest grave? Double tragedy of Melicent Shaw, crushed to death at a public execution...

Revived for Jan 2026 - Newstead's Pagan Plough Monday antics & "Byron-mania"

An Olde Love Story - Sir Richard Bingham, the King's judge of Watnall and his love adjudication...