Forsbrook

Pints, pies and pub nights

The Butchers' Arms on Cheadle Road used to be a plain village boozer and is now a Joule's Brewery taphouse that doubled in size during renovation, with stained-glass panels, oak flooring and a beer terrace wrapping round the front and side. A reviewer from Moorlands Eater wrote that they didn't have "a single criticism, or even a suggested tweak, for anything I ate that night."

The menu runs to steak and ale pie, proper fish and chips, a Butcher's Burger with Cheese, calves liver and onion, and a meat sharing platter, most mains around £12. A three-course meal comes to roughly £23 a head before drinks. Dogs are welcome everywhere except the restaurant. The beer is Joule's own — Slumbering Monk, a dark ale, Pale Ale, and a craft lager called Green Monkey.

Further along, the Roebuck Inn does stone-baked pizza and warm pork scratchings, has live music at weekends and bingo midweek, and shows Sky Sports on five screens. It holds 4.6 out of 5 on Google. Under-18s aren't admitted, according to one TripAdvisor review, which tells you roughly what kind of evening to expect.

Provisions and connections

For food to take home, Dudley's Butchers & Farm Shop opened on Cheadle Road in March, run by Matt Dudley and his partner Jazz Barnett. It sells Staffordshire Cheese Company cheeses, Cottage Delight jams, and hand-made sausages good enough that customers have driven over from Derby for them. Codswallop, the chip shop at number 50, sells battered cod that reviewers describe as consistently among the best for miles, though a few mention soggy batter on a busy night.

Blythe Bridge station is a short walk from the centre, on the Crewe to Derby line, and a handful of bus routes run through too, so you don't strictly need a car.

A copybook church and an empty manor

St Peter's Church, built in 1848 and 1849, was designed to be copied — the architects, James and Edward Barr, drew it as a pattern that could be put up "even in the Colonies." The stone came from Hollington. The chancel floor is encaustic tile, a gift from Herbert Minton, and the octagonal font moved into a new north aisle in 1912, when the entrance shifted to make room for it.

The Domesday survey recorded Forsbrook as waste in 1086. One ploughland, no population worth noting, the lord in 1066 a man named Swein, the lord in 1086 the king himself.

Gold in the hedge, water under the road

A labourer trimming a hedge here turned up a gold pendant later dated to the 7th century, set with a 4th-century Roman coin. It sold to the British Museum in 1879 for fifteen pounds.

The brook that gives the village its name ran through the square until 1932, crossed by a footbridge and a ford, before it was culverted under the road.

Stiles, steam and November sparks

A three-mile circular walk starts from the Butchers Arms car park, follows Dilhorne Road and Caverswall Road, and crosses the old Foxfield colliery railway — now a heritage steam line — over a set of stiles before dropping back through a stretch of tree-lined path.

Every November the Forsbrook Firework Spectacular fills the same ground where the village Wakes used to be held, before the First World War made bonfires feel wrong for a while. In 2013 the crowd topped 1,500 — the biggest gathering the village had seen in living memory.