Draycott in the Moors

From the Crossroads to St Margaret's

The building on the corner of Cheadle Road and Uttoxeter Road was the Draycott Arms, taken over in June 2015 by an owner keen on real ale and good food — two changing cask ales, usually Wincle Brewery on one hand pull, wood burners in both rooms. It closed as a pub on 21 October 2022 and reopened almost immediately at the same crossroads as La Villa Verde, an Italian restaurant and cocktail bar — the only one of the parish's three old pubs still open in any form. The Izaak Walton at Cresswell closed permanently in October 2020 and became housing. The Bird in Hand closed in 2005; demolition started on the empty building in 2012 and stopped partway through — it sat half-knocked-down for years before it finally went.

St Margaret's Church, on the other hand, is not going anywhere. The tower dates to the late 13th century — walls four feet thick — the rest largely refaced around 1848, possibly by Pugin. Grade II* listed, red sandstone, embattled parapet and gargoyles, and the Lady Chapel holds Draycott family chest-tombs, burials spanning the Crusades to the seventeenth century.

Church Treasures and Parish Life

There are eight bells, five from the 16th century, and yew trees said to predate the Norman Conquest. The church also keeps a roughly 2,500-year-old Iron Age stone, shaped like a sink, of no established purpose, and its war memorial is unusual for naming a woman: a nurse, killed on her way to help the wounded. Over in Cresswell, St Mary's — the Catholic church, built 1815–16 — was put up by Father Thomas Baddeley, said to have laid the bricks himself; he died shortly after, aged 36.

For anyone wanting to move rather than look, Draycott Sports Centre has run since 1972 — six outdoor tennis courts, two indoor, four squash courts, a gym, a badminton hall — and Blythe Cricket Club plays down in Cresswell. There's roughly fourteen miles of footpath across the district, three marked circuits, and Blythe Bridge station, on the Crewe–Derby line, about two miles off.

The Draycot Family and Anthony Draycot

The Draycot family were Norman lords of the manor who took the village's name as their own in the 12th century and kept it for over 500 years. One of them, Anthony Draycot, rector here and chancellor to the Bishop of Lichfield, condemned Protestants under Mary I, then refused the oath of supremacy under Elizabeth — losing every position he held except the Draycott rectory, and spending years in the Fleet Prison before being released to die at the family home, on 20 January 1571.

A Shepherd's Longevity and the Dole

Joseph Reeves, a shepherd, was said locally to have lived to 127. Local record has it that "he had never taken tobacco or physic, nor drank between meals," easing his thirst by rolling pebbles in his mouth. Every Mid-Lent Sunday since 1512, the Draycott Dole is still handed out — bread and herrings, funded by a rector's bequest, distributed to the parish poor centuries on.

Connections and a Remembered Midwife

Cheadle is two and a half miles off, Uttoxeter a short drive the other way, Alton Towers ten minutes by car. Betty Hammond, who delivered babies here as village midwife and sat on the parish council for thirty years, retiring at 94, is remembered well enough that hundreds turned out for her funeral in 2019.