Besthorpe is a small village in north-east Nottinghamshire close to the border with Lincolnshire. It is a Civil Parish in the Newark & Sherwood district of Nottinghamshire. The population of the civil parish as of the 2011 census is 195. The village is on the A1133 between Newark and Gainsborough, and is 1.5 miles north of the larger village of Collingham, north east of Newark on Trent. The village lies 1 mile east of the River Trent and the River Fleet flows south to east parallel with the village & A1133. Besthorpe acquired Conservation Village status in 2006 because it has maintained much of its original layout focused on Low Road and the Green. Etymology Besthorpe's name is derived from the Scandinavian word ‘thorpe’ meaning outlying farmstead or hamlet and probably the name of a key character called something like ‘Bosi’. It indicates that there was sufficient settlement here in the period of the Danelaw in the 10th century to give the place a name. Parishes and their boundaries were to be well established by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086. Geography Two key environments meet in Besthorpe. To the north and east the East Nottinghamshire Sandlands are an increasingly rare habitat supporting grass heaths, bracken, gorse and broom with mixed small-scale plantations of birch, oak and Scots pine. The River Fleet and the fields to the west are part of the Trent Washlands which provide the village with its River Meadowlands landscape of meadow and river pastures, extensive grasslands and meandering river channels. The Millennium Wood, alongside the A1133, was planted originally in 2000 and bluebells were added to mark the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. A current clearance project aims to keep this Wood accessible for leisure use. Besthorpe Nature Reserve The Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust has spent many years reworking old sand and gravel quarries into a nature reserve (officially opened in June 2011) with over 100 species of birds recorded including key colonies of tree-nesting great cormorants, a major heronry and sand martins. In 2013 a number of little egrets raised their chicks there – at the time considered to be the most northerly such colony in the UK. The Nature Reserve and car park is accessible from Trent Lane with a nearby SSSI meadow having great burnet plants, together with Yorkshire fog and meadow foxtail grass species. In the spring a range of wild flowers