Three hundred and fifty thousand visitors each year come for the Major Oak. Almost none discover what else awaits here.
Sherwood Forest, globally renowned yet rarely explored, beckons adventurers. Each year, hundreds of thousands arrive at the visitor centre near Edwinstowe, hike fifteen minutes to the Major Oak, snap a photo, and depart. They see only half a mile of a landscape that once covered a quarter of Nottinghamshire. They miss the Viking assembly site, royal palace ruins, and the forest’s oldest tree, unnoticed in a layby. These are Sherwood’s hidden corners that the crowds bypass.
Quick Facts
- Location: North Nottinghamshire, East Midlands
- Nearest town: Edwinstowe, near Mansfield
- Reserve size: 424 hectares (Sherwood Forest National Nature Reserve)
- Historic forest size: Approximately 19,000 acres at the time of the Domesday Book (1086)
- Best for: Ancient woodland walks, medieval history, wildlife, Robin Hood folklore
- Getting there: The visitor centre is off the B6034, near Edwinstowe. From the A1 or M1, follow signs for Ollerton and Edwinstowe.
1. The Parliament Oak, Clipstone
The Parliament Oak stands about a mile and a half from the Major Oak, located south of the A6075 between Edwinstowe and Mansfield. This rarely visited tree, estimated to be around 1,200 years old, is considered Sherwood Forest’s oldest living specimen. Access is from a layby, making it easily reachable by car, although many drive past without stopping.
It is but a fragment of its former glory. Once, this oak measured more than 25 feet in diameter. Its hollow trunk gave shelter to six men. Even now, diminished, the tree pushes out new limbs with a tenacity that mirrors its legendary past.
The name comes from Edward I, believed to have held a parliament here in 1290 en route to Scotland. Earlier tradition links it to King John, who supposedly called an emergency parliament here after news of revolts in Wales and northern England. The tree once marked the entrance to the Warsope Gate of the Royal Deer Park of Clipstone.
Today, it sits in a small layby with a basic information plaque, ignored by passing traffic. The Woodland Trust shortlisted it for Tree of the Year in 2017, yet most locals have never heard of it.
Where to Stay: The Forest Lodge on Church Street in Edwinstowe is an eighteenth-century coaching inn, family-run and four-star rated, a few hundred metres from the entrance to Sherwood Forest.
Worth Knowing: The Parliament Oak was nearly lost to fly-tipping and neglect. A restoration project in 2008, led by The Sherwood Forest Trust and Nottinghamshire County Council, installed hedgerows, parking and an information panel.
2. King John’s Palace, King’s Clipstone
Less than two miles from the Parliament Oak, in Kings Clipstone, stand the ruins of one of England’s largest medieval royal palaces—ignored by most passing travellers.
Known since the sixteenth century as King John’s Palace, the site was properly called the King’s Houses. It was built by Henry II from 1164 and, over the following two centuries, expanded into a vast complex covering more than seven acres. There were residential quarters, chapels, a great hall, stables for 200 horses, an artificially flooded lake, rabbit warrens and formal gardens. Eight successive monarchs, from Henry II to Richard II, used it as their base for hunting in Sherwood.
For much of the twentieth century, scholars dismissed the site as a hunting lodge. Recent archaeology, including a Time Team visit in 2011, revealed its true scale. Boundary ditches, medieval pottery, and window tracery carved from Mansfield White stone confirmed its major royal importance.
Now, only broken hall walls remain, standing silent in a field beside the village. No visitor centre, no ticket office, no gift shop. Only ancient stone, open sky, and deep quiet.
Where to Stay: The Dukeries Lodge in Edwinstowe is a beautifully refurbished eighteenth-century inn with 18 rooms, named after the great ducal estates that once surrounded the forest.
Worth Knowing: In 1315, during the Great Famine, Edward II spent months at the palace over Christmas, feasting and entertaining. His retinue devoured all the fish stocks in the palace pond and had to send men into the surrounding counties to find more food from the already starving population.
3. Budby South Forest
At the visitor centre, most people head left towards the Major Oak, but by turning right, visitors enter Budby South Forest. The entrance to Budby is at the main car park, which is less frequented but open to walkers and nature enthusiasts.
Budby is the largest surviving historic heathland in the East Midlands: a landscape of ling heather, sandy earth, scattered birch and Scots pine, and a silence unmatched by the southern woods. In summer, woodlarks, stonechats, and tree pipits nest on the heath. At dusk, nightjars hunt moths, their churring haunting the English countryside.
The RSPB manages Budby within the National Nature Reserve. English Longhorn cattle graze the heath, creating habitats for specialist species. Black oil beetles, green tiger beetles, and mining bees thrive in the sun-warmed Sherwood sandstone. Common lizards bask in clearings.
In September, purple heather carpets the land. In winter, crossbills and siskin flocks sweep through the pines. Budby is one of the most striking and least visited places in the East Midlands.
Where to Stay: The Forest Lodge in Edwinstowe, a short walk from the main visitor centre car park, which also serves as the access point for Budby.
Worth Knowing: Budby was used as a military training area before the RSPB took over management. The bare, sandy ground created by decades of disturbance has become a perfect habitat for rare invertebrates, including solitary and spider-hunting wasps.
4. Rufford Abbey
Rufford Abbey is located three miles south of Sherwood Forest, set within 150 acres of parkland and a lake. Access to the site is by car, with parking available for visitors who wish to explore the monastic ruins and grounds.
Founded in 1146 by twelve monks from Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, Rufford Abbey was chosen for its remoteness in Sherwood’s high forest. Creating the estate involved clearing three villages and likely relocating residents to Wellow.
The abbey church was dedicated to St Mary. Around it, the complex grew: cloister, kitchens, warming house, dormitories, and an undercroft. The lay brothers’ range, mostly from 1170, is the best-preserved Cistercian west cloister range in England. The vaulted undercroft still stands.
In 1290, Queen Eleanor of Castile stayed at the abbey while Edward I held parliament nearby at Clipstone. She fell ill and died en route to Lincoln. The Eleanor Crosses mark her final journey.
After the Dissolution, the abbey became a country house, passing to the Talbot and later Savile families. Much of the later structure was demolished in 1956. What remains is a layered ruin—medieval stone fused with seventeenth-century brick—framed by woodland, a lake, and a sculpture trail that most Sherwood visitors never discover.
Where to Stay: The Dukeries Lodge in Edwinstowe is a short drive from Rufford Abbey Country Park.
At the Dissolution, the Abbot of Rufford faced accusations of affairs with at least two married and four single women. Six monks were labelled “disgraceful.” Whether these claims were fact or fiction is uncertain.
5. Will Scarlet’s Grave, Blidworth
The Church of St Mary of the Purification sits on a hillside above Blidworth, overlooking a former Sherwood woodland. The churchyard, accessible by road, holds a weathered monument below ancient yews, which local tradition attributes to Will Scarlet’s grave.
Nobody knows the grave’s actual location. The monument, made from part of the earlier Norman church, was assembled at an unknown date. The tradition linking it to Scarlet dates to at least 1877, as John Potter Briscoe recorded in Nottinghamshire Facts and Fiction.
Blidworth has deeper Robin Hood connections than Edwinstowe, but fewer visitors. Legend places Maid Marian’s family here, and Will Scarlet supposedly knew every forest path. In 1276, two archers were caught poaching and imprisoned. That night, twenty men broke into the guard house, beat the guards, and freed the prisoners. Their identities remain unknown.
The church is the only one in England known to still hold an annual Rocking Ceremony, a thirteenth-century tradition where a baby is rocked in a flower-decorated cradle on the Feast of the Purification.
Where to Stay: The Forest Lodge in Edwinstowe. Blidworth is a short drive south through the forest.
Worth Knowing: On the church wall, a black marble plaque commemorates one “T. Leake,” surrounded by an alabaster frame carved with images of hunting, hounds, crossbows and longbows. Some believe this frame is a surviving remnant of Will Scarlet’s original memorial.
6. Thieves Wood
South of the main forest, on the road between Mansfield and Nottingham, lies Thieves Wood—a name earned honestly. Here, outlaws stalked travellers on the King’s Great Road, Sherwood’s main medieval artery.
This is a dark, dense woodland, less manicured than trails near the visitor centre. Robin Hood ballads mention Thieves Wood, which sits on the old road—an ideal spot for highway robbery in legend. The nearby Fountain Dale valley is where Robin Hood is said to have first met Friar Tuck and, in a contest of wit and strength, carried each other across the water.
Thieves Wood does not appear in the guidebooks. There are no information panels or waymarked trails. It is the kind of place you have to know about, or stumble into.
Where to Stay: The Dukeries Lodge in Edwinstowe. Thieves Wood is a short drive south towards Mansfield.
Worth Knowing: Fountain Dale, in the valley below Thieves Wood, contained a hermit’s cell associated with Friar Tuck. The cell was attached to a small chapel inside a moat belonging to nearby Newstead Abbey. Local tradition says that when the Friar was evicted after seven years’ residence, the well dried up for the same length of time.
7. St Mary’s Church, Edwinstowe
Every year, 350,000 people walk through the village of Edwinstowe on their way to Sherwood Forest. Most of them pass the parish church of St Mary without breaking stride. This is the church where, according to legend, Robin Hood married Maid Marian.
But the church holds an older and darker story. The village takes its name from King Edwin of Northumbria, who was killed at the Battle of Hatfield Chase in AD 633 by his Mercian rival, King Penda. Edwin’s body was carried into the forest and buried or hidden in the church that stood on this site. His head was later taken to York, his body to Whitby. The village that grew around the burial place became Edwin’s Stowe, the resting place of Edwin.
The present church dates mainly from the twelfth century, with later additions. The laws governing Edwinstowe in the medieval period were severe. In the 1330s, two successive vicars were convicted, one for poaching deer, the other for stealing foliage. Forest law allowed no exceptions, not even for men of the cloth.
One small privilege the forest did grant: marriages could take place without formal permission. They were held in the church doorway rather than inside. According to the Robin Hood tradition, this is exactly how Robin and Marian were wed.
Where to Stay: The Forest Lodge is directly next door to St Mary’s Church. You could not be closer.
Worth Knowing: A statue of Robin Hood proposing to Maid Marian stands in the centre of Edwinstowe village. Most visitors photograph it and then walk on to the forest without visiting the church itself.
8. Haywood Oaks
A few miles south of the main visitor centre, away from the waymarked trails and the crowds, Haywood Oaks is a small wood that preserves something the broader landscape has lost. Its mature oak trees are several hundred years old, standing in the kind of open wood pasture that once stretched across the entire Sherwood region.
This is not managed parkland. The trees have grown without interference, their limbs twisted and heavy, their trunks split and hollowed by centuries of weather. Walking here gives a clearer sense of what medieval Sherwood might have looked like than anywhere on the main trails.
Haywood Oaks sits along the line of the old road from Rufford Abbey to Nottingham, a route that medieval travellers would have followed through the high forest. It is quiet, unvisited and overlooked by every Sherwood guidebook.
Where to Stay: The Dukeries Lodge in Edwinstowe.
Worth Knowing: The name Haywood comes from the Old English for “enclosed wood.” It is a clue that this area was managed and fenced even in the Anglo-Saxon period, long before the Normans turned the wider forest into a royal hunting ground.
9. Thynghowe, Hanger Hill
Deep in the Birklands area of Sherwood, on a low rise amongst ancient oaks, lies one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the East Midlands, and one of the least known.
Thynghowe is a Viking-age assembly site. The name comes from the Old Norse “thing,” meaning a meeting or assembly, and “haugr,” meaning a mound or hill. This was a place where disputes were settled, laws discussed and community decisions made, perhaps a thousand years ago, in the open air, under the oaks.
The site was known locally as Hanger Hill, but its true significance was rediscovered by community archaeologists in recent years, working with the Sherwood Forest Trust and Mercian Archaeological Services. The name Thynghowe was found in medieval documents, and the site’s position, on the western edge of the ancient forest at the junction of old boundary lines, matched the pattern of known Viking assembly places across Scandinavia and the Danelaw.
There is no signage. No path leads directly to it. You find it by walking into the older, quieter parts of Birklands and looking for a slight rise in the ground among the trees. It is the kind of place where you stand still and realise that people have been standing in exactly this spot, making decisions that shaped their world, for over a millennium.
Where to Stay: The Forest Lodge in Edwinstowe, within walking distance of Birklands.
Worth Knowing: Viking assembly sites were typically placed at boundaries, on elevated ground and at the intersection of routes. Thynghowe fits every criterion. Similar “thing” sites are found across the former Danelaw, though few survive as clearly as this one.
10. The Centre Tree
In the heart of the old forest, at the junction of several ancient rides, stands a massive oak stump known as the Centre Tree. It once marked the geographical centre of the medieval Sherwood Forest.
The tree is dead now. Its trunk, enormous and hollow, sits at a crossroads of straight, wide paths that were cut through the forest as riding routes for the hunting parties of the Dukeries estates. These rides radiate outward like spokes from a wheel, and the Centre Tree sits at the hub.
Few visitors find it because few venture this far from the main trails. The path to the Centre Tree passes through the quieter parts of Birklands, where the ancient oaks grow thicker, and the canopy closes overhead. In autumn, the forest floor here is deep with fallen leaves and scattered with fungi. In spring, the birdsong is relentless.
There is something about standing at the centre of a forest that was once one of the most important landscapes in England and finding it completely empty. No interpretation panel. No gift shop. Just the stump, the rides and the oaks.
Where to Stay: The Dukeries Lodge in Edwinstowe, within easy reach of the Birklands trails.
Worth Knowing: The straight rides through Birklands were created by the great ducal estates, principally the Thoresby, Welbeck and Clumber estates, collectively known as The Dukeries. The rides were designed for hunting and landscape management, and they remain some of the most atmospheric walking routes in the forest.
Practical Tips
- Start at the Sherwood Forest Visitor Centre (managed by the RSPB), off the B6034 near Edwinstowe. Parking is usually £7 per day, free for RSPB members. Admission to the reserve itself is free.
- The AllTrails app is the best way to navigate walking routes across the wider Sherwood area, particularly for reaching the more remote sites like Thynghowe, Haywood Oaks and the Centre Tree.
- Budby South Forest is accessed from a layby on Swinecote Road, 200 metres north of the main visitor centre car park. There are no toilets at Budby.
- Rufford Abbey Country Park is free to enter, with a car parking charge. The abbey ruins are managed by English Heritage. Check opening times before visiting, as the interior of the ruins has been closed for conservation.
- The Parliament Oak is on the A6075 between Edwinstowe and Mansfield, with space for two cars in a small layby.
- The ruins of King John’s Palace at King’s Clipstone are open to the public, but there are no facilities.
- For the best nightjar experience at Budby, visit on a warm, still evening in late June. The RSPB runs guided Nightjar Jaunt walks from the visitor centre.
Responsible Visiting
Sherwood Forest is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation. Stay on marked paths where they exist. Do not climb on ancient trees or remove bark, fungi or deadwood. Between March and August, keep dogs on leads in Budby South Forest to protect ground-nesting birds. Campfires and barbecues are strictly prohibited anywhere in the forest. Do not fly drones within the SSSI without written permission from both the RSPB and Natural England.
Reader Q&A
Is the Major Oak still worth visiting? Yes. It is a remarkable tree, estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 years old, and the largest oak in Britain. But it should be the beginning of your visit, not the whole of it.
Can I walk between all ten sites in a single day? No. The sites are spread across a wide area. You could comfortably visit five or six in a day by car, with walking between the forest sites. Two days would allow you to see everything without rushing.
Is Sherwood Forest free to enter? Yes. There is a car parking charge at the visitor centre, but the forest itself is open to the public. Rufford Abbey Country Park also charges for parking but not for entry.
Are the Robin Hood connections genuine? The folklore is centuries old, recorded in ballads dating back to the fifteenth century and in local traditions that go back even further. Whether a historical Robin Hood existed is a separate question that scholars have debated for generations. What is genuine is the landscape: the forest, the churches, the villages and the outlaw culture that the forest laws created were all very real.
When is the best time to visit? Late spring for birdsong and bluebells. Late June for nightjars at Budby. September for purple heather. Autumn for fungi and the changing colour of the oaks. Winter for solitude.
Where to Stay
The Forest Lodge on Church Street in Edwinstowe is an eighteenth-century coaching inn directly beside St Mary’s Church, a few hundred metres from the forest entrance. Family-run, four-star rated, with a restaurant serving local produce and a bar stocking local cask ales.
The Dukeries Lodge in Edwinstowe is a refurbished eighteenth-century inn with 18 individually styled rooms, named after the great ducal estates that once surrounded the forest. A five-minute drive from Sherwood Pines and within easy reach of all the hidden corners.
The forest was here before the legends. Before Robin Hood, before the Normans, before the Vikings, who held their assemblies under its oaks. It will be here after the gift shops close and the car parks empty. The question is whether you walk past it or into it.
