Cresswell

The inn and the hamlet

The Izaak Walton Inn on Cresswell Lane reopened in March 2014 after a sympathetic restoration, then closed for good within six years and is now a private house. It's named after the seventeenth-century angler who wrote The Compleat Angler and is said to have fished the River Blithe nearby — CAMRA described it as a large open-plan pub with a beer garden and countryside views.

Cresswell itself is a hamlet, not much more than a scatter of houses about a mile southeast of Blythe Bridge, on the edge of the Staffordshire Moorlands. The Blithe runs close by, down through the Draycott valley on its way to the Trent, and you get a good look at it on the walk between Cresswell and Newton.

Cricket and three parish walks

There's no shop here now, no butcher, no post office. What there is instead is cricket: Blythe Cricket Club plays at Walton House, on ground that was once a pottery waste tip near where the pub used to stand — NSSCCL Division One champions in 2017, with a pitch for the under-11s and Lads & Dads football sessions.

Three walking routes start from around here, set out in a parish council booklet kept behind the bar at the Draycott Arms in the next village: the Cresswell Walk (7.5 miles), the Blythe Marsh Walk (4.5 miles) and the Totmonslow & Newton Walk (4 miles), past the old hamlet that gave its name to the Domesday "hundred" covering this stretch of Staffordshire.

Railways, relief and St Mary's

Cresswell had its own railway station once, with a branch to Cheadle opened in 1901 — both long gone, the tracks lifted in 2012. Blythe Bridge station, about a mile off, is the nearest one running today, and Cheadle, with Alton Towers beyond it, is about two and a half miles away by road.

The Roman Catholic church of St Mary's was built in 1815–16, paid for by Lady Mary Stourton of the Draycott estate — the first Catholic church raised in north Staffordshire after the Relief Act of 1791 made it possible again. Inside is a stained-glass window by Pugin dedicated to Lady Stourton, and vestments rescued from Paynsley Hall's private chapel.

Paynsley Hall and pub folklore

Paynsley Hall, between Cresswell and Newton, was the Draycot family seat from the Conquest to the end of the eighteenth century, changing hands more than once in the Civil War before being largely demolished; what's left is a scheduled ruin. Anthony Babington was raised partly under Philip Draycot's guardianship there, married his daughter Margery in 1579, and later plotted the assassination of Elizabeth I.

The old pub carries its own folklore. Izaak Walton is said to haunt the bar in the small hours of 2 September, unhappy about the newer extension and prone to moving or breaking clocks and lights. A second ghost, the Woman Who Laughs, was reportedly heard by the landlord's daughter, Sky, laughing in the empty restaurant. In 2012 three teenagers — Luke Emery, Will Jones and Will Wright — sat up overnight to see for themselves and found nothing, though a stopped grandfather clock nearby started chiming again days later.

One last warning after closing time

"The locals, particularly Billy, who has been coming here for thirty years, cite midnight-to-dawn on September 2nd as a time to avoid being in one particular part of the pub" — even though, these days, there's no pub left to avoid it in.