Consall

A Pub Beyond the Road

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. The Black Lion is about 1.4 miles east of the centre of Consall hamlet in a straight line; the route on foot is longer.

Ale, Food and a Field Nearby

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 kitchen serves hearty pub food, including Staffordshire oatcakes, meat baps, gammon and chips, and Sunday roasts; hog roasts are another regular feature. A camping field sits about ten metres from the door.

Kilns, Forge and Railway

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.

Gardens, Trails and Returning Wildlife

William Podmore spent fifty years reshaping 70 acres at Consall Hall Landscape Gardens, clearing industrial spoil heaps to create six lakes, follies and packhorse bridges. He wrote a book about the project. At Consall Nature Park, waymarked trails climb towards Kingsley Banks, with benches along the way.

Otters, kingfishers and herons are among the Churnet Valley's returning wildlife. A fish pass completed at Crumpwood Weir in 2019 opened another seven kilometres of river habitat to Atlantic salmon and brown trout.

A Hamlet After Domesday

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. The survey offers no explanation for how the hamlet reached that state; the valley's later industry has left much clearer traces.