Dilhorne

A Country Inn

The Royal Oak keeps a dog behind the bar called Sam, in a room built around a log-burner with the dining room windows looking out over moorland. The sandwiches come with fresh salad and homemade chips, served all day; there's a two-course option at lunch and in the evening, a Sunday roast, and a chalkboard of daily specials alongside a separate vegan and vegetarian menu. Reviewers keep mentioning the homemade cheesecake.

Getting Here and the Octagonal Tower

The GO2 bus runs between Newcastle, Longton, Blythe Bridge and Cheadle, stopping opposite the Royal Oak. Blythe Bridge station, the nearest railway stop, is about three miles off; Cheadle is two or three miles the other way, and Stoke-on-Trent is six.

All Saints church has a tower that is octagonal from the ground to the top, one of only a handful in the country built that way. Pevsner called it "stocky, octagonal and of 3 stepped-in stages with a parapet." The core dates to the late 13th century, with a 15th-century chancel and a Jacobean communion rail — one of nineteen listed buildings in and around the village.

A Place of Digging

The Domesday Book records the place as Delverne, a name that means "place of digging" — Dilhorne sits on the Cheadle Coalfield, where good coal seams reach the surface. In 1086 it had ten households and was valued at one pound a year to the lord.

That digging carried on for the best part of a millennium. Foxfield Colliery started in 1880 as Manns Pit, sunk on land whose owner had refused prospectors for years before relenting. It grew into the biggest mine on the coalfield and, eventually, the last one still working, closing in 1965 after a branch line up a 1-in-19 gradient — one of the steepest stretches of adhesion-worked standard-gauge track in Britain — had carried its coal out since 1893. The Foxfield Light Railway Society took over the line that same year; volunteers began restoring the colliery site itself in April 2024.

Railway Walks and Village Recreation

You can walk to it: a footpath runs from Dilhorne Park station, set in woodland 760 feet up with moorland views, straight to Foxfield station. A longer circular route goes from Cheadle church over the JCB test track to Dilhorne Wood, with a lunch stop at a Foxfield Railway platform on the way back.

The recreation ground occupies part of the former Dilhorne Hall estate, just under three acres, run by volunteers. It has a refurbished playground, a bowling green, a tennis court, a small café and a zip-wire park, and hosts weddings.

Between Rides and Working Fields

Cheadle is the nearest market town; Alton Towers is about 6.3 miles from Dilhorne in a straight line, with a longer road journey.

Dairy farming still goes on around Dilhorne, fewer farms than there used to be but still working the same land the Domesday clerks counted, not far from where volunteers are, right now, digging the old colliery back out of the ground.