Three things made Nottinghamshire what it is. The first is a river, the Trent, which crosses the county from south-west to north-east and gives it a wide central valley. The second is a forest - or what is left of one - the great medieval royal hunting ground of Sherwood, which once covered much of the centre of the county and now survives as patches of oak woodland that still feel ancient when you walk into them. The third is coal, which lay in seams nearly 900 metres thick beneath the northern parishes and which built and emptied a hundred mining villages over two centuries.
The Fosse Way, the great Roman road from Exeter to Lincoln, runs along the eastern edge of the county. There were Roman settlements at Mansfield and a fort at Broxtowe near modern Nottingham. After the legions left the area was settled by Angles in the 5th century and became part of the kingdom and later earldom of Mercia. The county's name first appears in 1016, though until 1568 Nottinghamshire was administratively united with Derbyshire under a single sheriff. The Domesday Book of 1086 records that Edward the Confessor had held land here at Mansfield, Sutton in Ashfield, Skegby, Edwinstowe, Warsop, and a long roll of other villages whose names still appear on road signs. William the Conqueror made Sherwood a royal forest for hunting, and the kings of England came here regularly. King John kept a palace at Clipstone, and it was there that Richard the Lionheart himself visited Sherwood Forest in March 1194 on his return from the crusades.
Two stories from Nottinghamshire have travelled further than the county itself. The first is Robin Hood, the medieval outlaw whose Sherwood Forest exploits have generated centuries of ballad, theatre, film, and a steady trickle of tourists toward the great oak called the Major Oak at Edwinstowe. The second is harder and stranger: the Pilgrim Fathers. William Brewster came from the village of Scrooby in the north of the county. He was influenced by Richard Clyfton, who preached at Babworth. The congregation that grew around these men crossed to Holland in 1608, then to Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620, and helped to shape what eventually became the United States. The villages they came from are quiet now - hedged lanes, brick farmhouses, a few signposts to mark the connection - but the religious dissent that flourished in 17th-century Nottinghamshire was not a marginal phenomenon. Mansfield in particular became a centre of nonconformism, and George Fox, founder of the Quakers, lived there for a time.
Nottinghamshire was an early industrial county. The Wollaton wagonway of 1603-1616, which carried coal from bell pits at Strelley and Bilborough, was one of the first railways in the world. William Lee, born in the county, invented the knitting frame and turned Nottingham into a synonym for lace. By the 18th and 19th centuries deeper mechanised collieries opened in the north, and coal became the dominant industry of the Leen Valley. Silverhill, in the west of the county, is a human-made hill - a colliery spoil heap that at 204 metres is among the highest points in Nottinghamshire, just below the natural high point near Newtonwood Lane at 205 metres. The pits are all closed now, the last working mine gone, and the county's economy has had to remake itself around distribution, manufacturing, and a clutch of well-funded universities in Nottingham. The lace industry, too, is mostly memory. What survives is the geography it carved - the canal at Worksop, the railway lines threading north and east, the rows of pit-village terraces that still cling to the slope above where the shaft used to be.
In the north of the county sits the Dukeries, four contiguous ducal estates - Clumber, Welbeck, Worksop Manor, Thoresby - that gave a long stretch of countryside its character. Welbeck Abbey and the Harley Gallery are still open to visitors. Clumber Park, owned by the National Trust, draws walkers to its lake and lime avenue. Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of Lord Byron, sits south of Mansfield and is now owned by Nottingham City Council. The acclaimed novelist D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood. The county's geology - coal measures in the north, sandstone and limestone in the west, clay in the east, the Humberhead Levels in the very north - shapes both the farming and the look of the villages. An unofficial county flag was registered in 2011, with a red cross on a green field and a green figure of an archer in the centre. The autumn crocus, voted county flower in 2002, blooms each September in scattered colonies of pale purple. Notts County, founded in 1862, is the world's oldest professional football club, and the black-and-white striped kit they gave to Juventus a century ago is still worn in Turin. Some things stay. Some things move on. Nottinghamshire has been deciding which is which for a thousand years.
Centred around 53.17°N, 1.00°W. The ceremonial county covers 2,160 square kilometres of the East Midlands, bordered by South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire. Main airports: East Midlands (EGNX) on the southern boundary, Doncaster Sheffield (EGCN) just outside the north-western boundary, Humberside (EGNJ) east of the Trent. From 10,000 ft the long line of the Trent Valley is the dominant feature, with Sherwood Forest as a paler patch of oak woodland in the centre and the urban sprawl of Greater Nottingham in the south-west. The Dukeries parklands are clearly visible in the north. Approach Nottingham via the M1 corridor.