Wellow is said to be the only village in the country with a green, as distinct from a grassed over market place. Most English villages are mentioned in the Doomsday Book (1086), but not Wellow because it did not exist then. The nearest villages were Grimston (perpetuated in Grimston Hill, less than 1m E) and Rufford to the SW. When Cistercian monks came to Rufford in 1145 they created the kind of rural seclusion they desired by buying out the villagers of Rufford. The displaced peasants planned a new fortified village for themselves - Wellow, with a bank and ditch (called George Dyke) , all round and a triangular green in the centre, now dominated by the maypole. On the S and W the defence is natural, a stream cutting its course deep in the Keuper marl, like a dumble. You can walk some way along it at the S end of the village. The rest of the circuit is a man-made bank and ditch. It crosses the road to Newark (A616) at the E end of the village, opposite the pinfold. The green has remained intact except that the Primitive Methodists were allowed in 1847 to build their chapel on it. Houses surround the green in a pleasantly unselfconscious way. All are brick, except for one with exposed timbers, and facing the N end of the green is another, evidently timber-framed under its white rendering, for it has a jetty or overhang; Wellow Hall, on the left as you come in from Ollerton, has been restored, and its Georgian wing lies longside the road. Towards Newark there are three simple farmhouse of the kind fashionable here in Georgian times: central doorway, one window either side, three windows upstairs. chimneys at the gable end. The church, off the green to the E, is small, and was started in the12th century by the villagers themselves. The track going N from the pinfold leads to Jordan Castle Farm. It takes its name from an earthwork in the field beyond, nearly ploughed out now; archaeologists recognize it as a ring work, which must have belonged to a 13th century Jordan Foliot, lord of Grimston.