Eastwood is a busy, small town, about twelve miles west of Nottingham. It lies just within the county boundary with Derbyshire. Its name probably derived from a settlement in a clearing of the old Sherwood Forest. It sits mostly on a hilltop, which is the meeting place for main roads from Derby, Mansfield and Nottingham. At this junction is the still flourishing ‘Sun Inn', where, in 1817, the ‘Pentrich Uprising', led by Jeremiah Brandreth, mostly petered out and where, in 1832, so a plaque informs us, the Midland Railway was formed by a meeting of interested parties. The irony about the latter event is that Eastwood lost both its railway station and its line in the 1960s and is now some distance from the rail network.

But Eastwood's main claim to fame is literary. The novelist David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at No. 8a Victoria Street. A brown sign just after the start of Nottingham Road now directs the visitor to his Birthplace Museum, a former terraced house. He was baptised on 29 November, at St. Mary's, the Eastwood Parish Church, which a visitor interested in history would find disappointing, as...