Denstone

Firelight on College Road

The Tavern is a squat seventeenth-century building on College Road that hasn't been messed with much: original beams, log fires, and a family that has run it as a proper village pub rather than a project. The building dates from 1669. Thursday is pie night, wood-fired pizzas (hand-stretched Italian dough, £8-£10) go on Friday and Saturday evenings, and Sunday means a carvery across two sittings, from quarter past twelve.

Three Marston's-group ales are always on — Pedigree, Wainwright Gold, Brains Rev James Original — plus a rotating guest. There's a beer garden out back, dogs are welcome in the bar, and Monday is quiz night. The pub has picked up CAMRA's Uttoxeter Sub-Branch Pub of the Season twice and Pub of the Year once, plus Marston's own Pub Restaurant of the Year in 2013. One reviewer called it "a genuine gem — a true country pub — go out of your way for a visit," which is the sort of thing people say about a pub that has quietly done the same things well for three and a half centuries.

Farm Food and the Lost Railway

For daytime food there's Denstone Hall Farm Shop & Café, on a working beef and arable farm on the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border by the River Churnet — its own butchery and deli, a bakery turning out fresh bread, and a café doing breakfasts, daily specials and barista coffee.

Denstone sits on both the Staffordshire Way and the Tissington Trail, so walkers and cyclists pass through regularly. The best local route uses the old Churnet Valley Railway trackbed, closed since 1965; the disused platforms survive at the level crossing on College Road, now folded into the footpath. From Denstone Hall it runs north along the river to Crumpwood Weir, past Alton Towers, to the woodland and ponds of Dimmingsdale, and back through Alton — about five miles round, or shorter there-and-back to Alton alone. Uttoxeter, with the nearest working station, is a short drive; Denstone lost its own, "Denstone Crossing," in 1965.

Village Life and Victorian Ambition

There's a tennis club, a sports field with a full cricket, football and hockey set-up, and a playground behind the pub that was recently done up. The Fiesta returns each July with a Christmas Market and brass band appearing again in December, and the Christmas lights switch-on has been running more than twenty-five years.

All Saints' Church, Grade II*-listed, was built in 1860-62 by George Edmund Street, funded by Sir Thomas Percival Heywood, who also paid for the vicarage, the school and, later, the land for Denstone College. The Parish Council puts it plainly: there are records of the place going back to Norman times, but Denstone "was not really established" until Heywood arrived in 1840. The college itself, a Woodard school founded in 1868, has its own Grade II chapel by Richard Carpenter and Benjamin Ingelow, four bays and a polygonal apse, finished in 1887. Quentin Crisp was a pupil there, before he was famous and before he left for London.

Industry and a Million-Pound Neighbour

JCB's world headquarters sits immediately south of the village on the road to Rocester, with its own lake. And somewhere in Denstone lives David Edwards, who was only the second person ever to win the top prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which is a strange thing to know about your neighbour.