The Star at Cotton has parts dating to the 16th century, and it sits at the top of Star Bank. Reviewers reach for the same word often enough that it stops sounding like flattery and starts sounding like an inventory: beams, log fires, cosy.
Head Chef Jake Corbishley runs a seasonally changing menu heavy on steak burgers, pies, fish and chips, and a Sunday roast. There's a large gluten-free menu, and dogs are welcome in parts of the bar and the garden, where they're handed a towel and a bowl of water rather than an apologetic look. Expect around £20-£30 a head; one larger group celebrating properly reported £70-80pp for the full works.
The pub holds a Staffordshire Pub of the Year bronze and a 2021 Staff Canteen Award for front-of-house, plus a 4.5 rating on Tripadvisor. Open Monday to Saturday, noon till 10, food until 8; Sundays shut earlier, at 7, food off by 5.
There's no shop in Cotton itself — no butcher, no bakery, nothing to duck into for a paper. The Star is, in effect, the village's one public room.
What Cotton has instead is Cotton Dell, a Staffordshire Wildlife Trust reserve half a mile north, 86 hectares continuously wooded for more than 400 years. Cotton Brook runs through it, past ponds and boggy patches and an 18th-century dry-stone bridge — built for the valley's old industry, restored again in November 2025. Dead wood is left where it falls, for the fungi and the woodpeckers.
Inside the Dell is Bill's Rock, the reserve's one proper landmark, and the story attached to it depends on who's telling it. One version has a landowner's daughter and a farm worker leaping to their deaths rather than be parted, the hounds turning on their masters. The drier version has a man called Colonel Bill, drunk from a night at the Star, chasing a fox over the rocks into the brook below. Cotton lets you pick.
St Wilfrid's, up the hill, is a Pugin church, built 1846-48, and Pugin thought enough of his own chancel to call it "the only perfect chancel in England." It opened on Easter Tuesday, 25 April 1848, with Bishop Wiseman singing the Mass and John Henry Newman preaching. Newman didn't move into Cotton Hall as superior of England's first Oratorian community until that October, staying only until the following April, when the whole operation left for London to found the London Oratory.
Frederick Faber, who led the community before Newman took over, is said locally to have written "Faith of our Fathers" here shortly before everyone left. The church closed in 2011 after dry rot took hold; the last Mass was said the October before.
Cotton College, the boarding school the Oratorians' old hall eventually became, closed in 1987 and has sat empty since — long enough that it now turns up in urban explorers' videos more often than in parish newsletters.
Blythe Bridge station, on the Crewe-Derby line, is the nearest railway, and the AT3 bus runs from there through Cotton to Alton Towers, a mile down the road. Most people passing through are headed for the theme park. The ones who stop generally end up at the Star, by the fire, deciding which version of the fox story they believe.
