Free-range chickens have the run of the beer garden at the Black Lion, and nobody seems bothered enough to fence them in. That's Consall Forge in miniature: a hamlet so small it doesn't so much have infrastructure as work around not having any.
There's no road to the pub. You park above the valley and walk down, crossing a bridge over the Caldon Canal and then a level crossing over the Churnet Valley Railway line — or, if you'd rather, you arrive by narrowboat and tie up outside. The Staffordshire Way passes directly in front of the door, so plenty of the regulars turn up mid-walk rather than mid-drive.
Inside it's red quarry tiles and wooden benches, and the beer is taken seriously. Peakstones Rock Brewery in Alton supplies the house ale, Black Hole, a 4.8% old ale, with guest beers rotating in from Consall Forge and Falstaff breweries and a long list of real ciders alongside. The pub has won Staffordshire Moorlands Cider Pub of the Year two years running, 2024 and 2025, and was Village Pub of the Year in 2017.
The landlord, Jason, runs a kitchen that does a Roast Pork Bap with beef dripping fries, a Gammon Steak with egg and chips, Blue Cheese Chips, and Staffordshire oatcakes, with a Sunday roast and regular hog roasts. Reviews call the food "unpretentious, honest and priced fairly," though more than one visitor has noted it gets busy enough to test your patience while you wait. A camping field sits about ten metres from the door, for anyone who'd rather not walk back out again.
Cross the canal bridge and you're walking into a valley that used to be industrial and no longer looks it. A bank of four lime kilns was built into the canalised River Churnet in the early 1800s by the Leigh family of Consall Hall, burning limestone barged in from Caldon Low; they were rebuilt once, in 1820, and the company running them failed in 1840. Ironworking here goes back further, to 1290, and a forge powered by the Churnet gave Consall Forge its name by the mid-17th century.
The railway followed the industry and then outlived it. Consall station closed to passengers in 1965 and its building was pulled down in the early 1980s. Volunteers cleared the derelict site through the 1990s, and a near-exact replica opened on the old brick base in March 2002 — a hundred years to the day after the first one. Pete Waterman did the honours.
Consall Hall Landscape Gardens sit beside the village: 70 acres, six lakes, follies and packhorse bridges, shaped almost single-handedly over fifty years by William Podmore, who spent his life clearing old spoil heaps and reworking the valley into what's there now. He wrote a book about it. Consall Nature Park, next door, has waymarked trails climbing to Kingsley Banks and benches along the way.
Otters, kingfishers and herons have returned to the Churnet as the water's cleaned up, and a salmon reintroduction programme is now underway.
The Domesday Book recorded Consall as "waste" in 1086 — no plough teams, no villagers, no value entered at all — one of a small cluster of estates left that way after the Conquest. Whatever happened here in 1066 doesn't seem to have left much trace nine hundred years on, beyond the chickens in the beer garden, working the towpath for walkers who might be carrying crumbs.
