The White Hart on the High Street runs a Thai menu three nights a week — Thursday to Saturday, six until half past eight, booking advised — and free pool on Mondays. It's Alton's oldest pub, and for a while in the early 2010s it looked like it might not survive: the owner, Marston's, shut it for six months and put the building up for sale. Two villagers, John Moorhouse and Tom Wilkinson, got it listed as an Asset of Community Value, then raised £270,000 through pledges, share issues and loans from around eighty shareholders. The village bought its own pub in 2015 and now runs it as the Alton White Hart Community Interest Company. There's a games room with darts, pool and skittles, a coffee shop open Thursday to Saturday mornings, a beer garden with a real fire, one double and two family B&B rooms, and two permanent cask ales — regulars include Timothy Taylor Landlord and Marston's Pedigree — plus a rotating third from Rural Brewing Co., who brew in the village too. Dogs are welcome in the games room and bar. CAMRA named it Pub of the Season in spring 2019.
Alton sits in the Churnet Valley on the edge of the Staffordshire Moorlands, close enough to the Peak District boundary that the two blur into one another. The valley here runs to steep wooded slopes and stream cuts rather than open farmland. There were 1,226 people at the 2011 census, spread through a conservation area shared with the neighbouring hamlet of Farley, reachable on foot across the fields on a footpath off Farley Lane. Sixty-three buildings in the parish are listed, one of them Grade I. The village sits off the B5032, with the A52 and A50 the nearest main roads toward Uttoxeter and Stoke-on-Trent.
The Bulls Head, further along the High Street, is a 17th-century coaching inn that has swallowed the building next door — the old village Co-op is now part of the pub. It stood closed for a while before James Miller, who grew up in Alton, and his wife Gemma took it on and spent over £100,000 rebuilding it, reopening on a Friday in June with a new oak bar built into the old Co-op shell. There's a snug with Chesterfield sofas and a log burner, a function room that does weddings and live music, stone-baked pizzas, steaks, a Smoke House menu of ribs and wings, up to four real ales, craft beer from the UK, the US and Europe, and over seventy speciality gins. Dogs are welcome, there's a patio and a car park round the back, and the building is Grade II listed.
Down on Station Road, the Talbot spent sixteen years closed and derelict before reopening in June 2018. It first appears in the parish register in 1827, under Thomas and Ann Weston; when Thomas died, Ann ran it alone until 1863, then her son Matthew took over, then William and Margaret Green, then William and Hannah Parrington, who gave free drinks to unemployed men during the Depression and coached the local cricket team. William died in 1942; Hannah kept the pub going until 1950, when their son Bill and his wife Sheila took over — along with the family parrot, Polly, who was enough of a draw that people came in just to see her. Bill died in 1975; Sheila retired in 1981. Around 1900 the pub was advertising itself as "only three minutes from the Railway Station," selling Worthington's Noted Burton Ales and Guinness's Dublin Stout. It's walk-ins only today, no bookings, for fish and chips, a Talbot burger, pie of the day, and a Sunday carvery with a choice of three meats. Five handpulls, Sharp's Doom Bar and Solar Wave among the regulars, guest ales from Leatherbritches, Peakstones Rock and Titanic, real cider on tap, and a garden shared with the Alton Bridge Hotel next door that runs down to the River Churnet. One TripAdvisor reviewer put it plainly: "Really cosy pub, open fire, good bar and seating areas, dogs very welcome." CAMRA gave it Rising Star in 2019 and Pub of the Season twice since.
Out on Cheadle Road, at the edge of the village, the Peakstones Inn is older again — part of the building is around 500 years old, and it started life as the gatekeeper's lodge for the Alton Towers estate. It grew from a small bar attached to a farm in the mid-1970s into a full pub with two open fires, a hexagonal revolving pool table, camping and static caravans in the grounds, and a themed restaurant called the Piggery and Friends, a nod to the site's time as a pig farm. Evening meals run seven to nine, every day. Real ale, according to CAMRA, is not always available, which at least is honest.
Once a year the pubs join forces for the Alton Beer Festival, with a classic car show, street food and live music alongside it, the proceeds going to local charities.
The post office is on Smithy Bank, open weekday mornings and afternoons and Saturday mornings only. A hardware shop, a florist and a newsagent's cover the rest of the High Street trade. For a proper food shop, it's a short drive to the neighbouring village of Denstone, where Denstone Hall Farm Shop & Café has its own butchery and deli counter, a café and a gift shop, sitting by the Churnet on the Staffordshire–Derbyshire border.
The Hurstones on Hurstons Lane is the village hall — a playing field, a play area, a full-size football pitch, a stage and a fitted bar, kept going by a charity set up for exactly that purpose.
St Peter's Church is Grade II* listed and older than almost everything else standing in the village. Bertram de Verdun, lord of Alton, founded it in the 12th century and gave it to the Abbey of Croxden; the north arcade and the tower are what survive from that build, three stages of stone with a pointed west door, clock faces, gargoyles and an embattled parapet. The rest was rebuilt in 1831 and extended again in 1884–85 by the architect J. R. Naylor.
Above the river, Alton Castle has had two entirely different lives. Bertram de Verdun built the first stone fortress here in the 12th century, on a site fortified in timber since Saxon times, and founded Croxden Abbey nearby in 1176. The castle got a gatehouse in the early 14th century, was substantially rebuilt again in the 15th, and was slighted by Parliamentary troops in 1643 — deliberately pulled apart so it couldn't be held again. It sat as a ruin for two centuries until John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, rebuilt it from 1847 to 1852 as a Gothic Revival fantasy, to designs by A. W. N. Pugin. The Sisters of Mercy moved into the old presbytery as a convent in 1855; the Archdiocese of Birmingham bought the site in 1995, and it has run as a Catholic youth retreat centre since September 1996. Pugin also designed the castle's chapel, the Catholic Church of St John the Baptist, and the neighbouring St John's School, a Grade II* building with corner towers, an embattled parapet and a semi-octagonal chapel end — originally built as a house before it became a school.
Across the valley, on the other side of the Churnet, are the ruins of Alton Mansion, the building most people mean when they say Alton Towers. Pugin designed that one too, for the same Earls of Shrewsbury; the gardens were laid out from around 1814 by the 15th Earl with the designers Robert Abraham and Thomas Allason. The house itself was gutted in 1951–52, leaving the stone shell that still stands in the grounds of what is now Alton Towers Resort — the theme park and waterpark built around it at the edge of the village.
Somewhere near the estate stands the Chained Oak, roughly 700 years old, its branches bound in iron. The story goes that an Earl of Shrewsbury refused alms to an old beggar woman, who cursed his family so that one of them would die every time a branch fell from the tree; a storm brought a branch down, a family member reportedly died that same night, and the Earl had every remaining branch chained to stop the curse running its course. Sources disagree on which Earl — the BBC dates it to 1821 and Charles Talbot, the 15th Earl, while Alton Towers' own heritage account puts it around the 1840s and blames John Talbot, the 16th. Either way, it's the tree that gave the theme park's Hex ride its name.
The Domesday survey of 1086 recorded Alton as waste — two ploughlands, no villagers, King William I himself as both tenant-in-chief and lord — which for a place later rebuilt into a Pugin fantasy is a fairly bleak starting point. The village kept its own lock-up, the Round House: built in 1819 by the Earl of Shrewsbury to hold drunks and vagrants overnight, a single circular cell about four metres across under a domed roof with a ball finial on top, now Grade II listed and a scheduled monument. Alton's old mill, recorded as belonging to the Cistercian monks of Croxden Abbey in the 17th century, had become a brass wire and slitting mill by the early 1700s and was employing fifty men by 1817. The Malt House on the same stretch, late 17th century and Grade II* listed, is brick with stone dressings, an underground malt kiln and cellars behind a Tuscan portico, and a granary next door on pyramidal-capped stone piers.
Walking routes fan out in every direction. The Walk Around Alton is a circular route of just under six miles through the village, roughly following the Staffordshire Way, with castle views for most of it. From the Ramblers' Retreat tearoom in Dimmingsdale there are three marked routes — four miles, seven miles taking in the disused Churnet Valley railway line, and a hillier ten-mile version. The Oakamoor circular follows the old railway line and canal towpath along the Churnet, mostly flat and off-road. Consall Nature Park, a little further downstream, has 479 acres of colour-coded trails through what used to be industrial land beside the river and the Caldon Canal, from a half-hour pond circuit to a proper climb up to Kingsley Bank; the Black Lion at Consall Forge sits right over the tracks of the Churnet Valley steam railway, so you can watch a train go by with a pint in hand.
Croxden Abbey, the ruined Cistercian house de Verdun founded in 1176, is free to visit and run by English Heritage — it held around seventy monks at its 13th-century peak before the Dissolution closed it in 1538. Uttoxeter, the nearest proper town, has held a market since a charter of 1308 and still runs one three days a week. Cheadle, the other direction, has a JCB factory; the company is headquartered at Rocester, also nearby.
Alton had its own railway station from 1849 until the North Staffordshire Railway line closed in January 1965. These days the nearest station is Uttoxeter, about ten miles and twenty minutes by car, or roughly half an hour by bus — the X41 runs daily from Stafford and Uttoxeter to Alton Towers Resort, departing Stafford at 9.30am, and the 32X runs Monday to Saturday from Stoke-on-Trent station, departing at 8.55am. Stoke's mainline station is about fifteen miles off. The nearest bus stop, on Station Road, is a three-minute walk from the village centre.
Sunday morning at St Peter's, the Norman arcade is still holding up the aisle it has held up for eight centuries, and down on the High Street the pool table at the White Hart sits idle until Monday, when it's free again — the one thing left in the village that doesn't cost anything, in a place that once had to spend £270,000 just to keep hold of its own pub.
