Croxden

A Road Through the Ruins

A public road runs straight through the middle of Croxden Abbey, splitting the ruined church in two. It was cut across the site after the Dissolution, when the monks were gone and nobody minded where a track went. You can park either side of it and walk the ruins in an afternoon.

Croxden itself is barely a village — 255 people across the whole parish, taking in Great Gate, Fole and Beamhurst: farmhouses, cottages and barn conversions along narrow lanes in the Staffordshire Moorlands. There's no shop and no pub within the village boundary. What there is instead is quiet, fields, and a very good excuse for a walk.

The Walk to Hollington

That walk is the Croxden Abbey Circular, starting from Hollington in two lengths. The short loop is 2.5 miles, crossing farmland into Hollington, an hour to ninety minutes. The long one is 7.25 miles, hillier and quieter, with a stretch through a small golf course — mind the stray balls. Paths can be muddy; boots rather than trainers.

The short loop's real destination is the Star Inn at Hollington, an 18th-century pub overlooking the Tean Valley. It's CAMRA-listed, dog friendly, with a large patio, covered seating and an outdoor play area. Reviewers single out the Loaded Nachos and the Fish & Chips. One walker called it "a great pub with lovely views from the beer garden," which is about right.

Parish and Abbey

Back in Croxden, St Giles' Church was built in 1884–85 at the expense of the Earl of Macclesfield, replacing a 13th-century chapel that had served as the parish church since the Dissolution. A former Cheese Factory in the village, now a private house, is Grade II listed — the only trace of a vanished dairy business.

The abbey is the reason any of this exists. Bertram de Verdun, Lord of Alton Castle, granted the land in 1176 to twelve Cistercian monks from Normandy; by 1315 Croxden supplied more wool to Florentine merchants than any other religious house in the county. The monks kept a chronicle from 1066 to 1374, recording an earthquake during their first meal on 22 July 1301, and later "a great pestilence throughout the whole world" in 1349. By 1377–81, decline and debt had reduced the community to an abbot and six monks. The abbey surrendered in September 1538, and Henry VIII had the roof pulled off so nobody could move back in. Domesday, five centuries earlier, had valued the whole place at five shillings.

Connections and Crusade

Uttoxeter, with its market square and racecourse, is four or five miles south and the nearest railway station; Alton Towers about four miles the other way. The village runs off the A522, on lanes too narrow to hurry down.

Bertram de Verdun never came home. He died at Acre in 1192, during the Third Crusade, made governor of the city after its fall; the abbey's own chronicle remembers him as a man "of pious memory." His sword, banner and armour were carried back to Alton Castle, a few miles from the abbey he'd founded and would never see finished.

A Living Parish

St Giles' keeps an Abbey Room at the back, hired out for meetings, and over in Great Gate the parish council mows a small village green. Neither is much to look at. Both are proof the place is still lived in, not just visited.