“To give you a little character of Nottingham, it may be called, as a man may say, paradise restored, for here you find large streets, fair built houses, fine women, and many coaches rattling about, and their shops full of merchantable riches. As to the situation of it, it is upon a pleasant rock of freestone in which everyone that will may have cellars, and that without the trouble of springs or moisture, so that excepting Bridgenorth in Shropshire you cannot find such another town in England.
It is divided into the upper and lower towns, for when you have a mind to leave the large and more spacious parts of this town on the plain of the hill and will go down to the lower streets near the river, you must descend down right many stairs ere you get to the bottom, and here you find as it were another town full of shops and people who have a convenience to cut in the rock warehouses, stables, or what rooms else they please for their own peculiar uses. This town hath in the upper part of it a large and long market place.
For public buildings here are four pillars with many stairs to ascend each of them, and three churches one of them bigger than the rest, in which they are now putting up an organ, ann: 1675; but that which will yet add a greater beauty and ornament to this town is the Duke of Newcastle’s now building a sumptuous house in the ruins of old Nottingham Castle whose walls were demolished by the Parliamentarian and Oliverian people. This house is seated on a rock extending itself towards the river so far as the land will permit, where such as have a mind from this high precipice may tumble headlong into the river Trent many yards beneath it. They have got up this building as high as the first storey, having in it a noble staircase, each stair being made of one large entire stone, brought hither from Mansfield, carried up as to form in a large square without any pillars to support it, each stair geometrically depending one upon another. For wine here in this town, good claret, white wine, and Rhenish, but as to sack, I cannot say much, and I believe here are about half a dozen taverns in the town.”
Thomas Baskerville
(c.1675)
Journeys in England in the time of Charles II
H.M.C., Portland, ii (1893), 308—309.
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