Foxt

A pub above the Churnet Valley

The Fox & Goose is built from stone and stands at the top of the lane that climbs for about a mile out of Froghall Wharf — steep enough that the pub feels like a reward for the climb. From the conservatory and the tables outside, you get the reason people make it: the Churnet Valley opens out below.

The food runs to smoked beef ribs, steaks, burgers, and a proper vegetarian selection, with Thursday set aside for steak night and Sunday for a carvery. Reckon on £10 to £38 a head. It's the only restaurant in Foxt on Tripadvisor, which sounds like faint praise until you read the 250 reviews — the beef brisket and the Sunday lunch get singled out repeatedly, and more than one visitor has called the steaks "an absolute bargain."

Beer, welcome and village life

At the bar: Draught Bass and Timothy Taylor Landlord as regulars, plus two rotating guest ales — usually Peakstones Rock, Titanic or Wincle — and a seasonal real cider. There's a beer festival every August and a quiz night every other week. Dogs are welcome on leads, walkers and cyclists too, muddy or not; one review mentions a landlord from Queensland who waved in a whole group still dripping from the hills outside.

Foxt itself is small — a scattered hamlet on the hillside above the river, a couple of hundred people, no shop, no post office. What there is instead is Foxt Village Hall, which keeps a calendar going alongside the pub: an annual Flower Festival, a Christmas Tree Sale.

Wharf industry and the long circular

Walk down to Froghall Wharf and you're at the foot of what used to be one of the busiest points on the Caldon Canal — lime kilns, warehousing, a tramway once hauling a thousand tons of limestone a day, until a rival quarry at Buxton took the trade in 1920 and the line closed. The Churnet Valley Railway's steam trains still run the valley below.

The best circular walk goes back up through Foxt to Ipstones, past Belmont Hall, down the two hundred steps of the Devil's Staircase, then along the towpath past Flint Mill Lock and Cherry Eye Bridge — named for a disused ironstone mine once worked for paint pigment. One stretch, between Foxt and Ipstones, drops into a valley and crosses a stream on a path the guidebooks admit is "only fit for those on foot." The nearest working station is Stoke-on-Trent; closer, but heritage-only, is Consall.

St Mark's and Ipstones Edge

The church, St Mark's, went up in 1846–47 in the Early English Gothic style Francis Niblett favoured for the period's new Anglican churches. Historic England rates it "a successful and early example of the ecclesiological style," which is a lot of words to say it was ahead of the trend. None of it makes the Domesday record — Foxt doesn't appear as a manor, and the parish wasn't written up as "Yppestan" until 1175.

Ipstones Edge, above the village, gets you to about 1,250 feet and views across the Staffordshire Moorlands. Ipstones itself, with its own pub the Sea Lion Inn, is close by; Alton Towers a short drive the other way, if that's what brought you this far.

One last measure of hospitality

Back at the Fox & Goose, a Tripadvisor reviewer's dog, Loki, once got the chef to come out with the trimmings from that evening's steaks. That's roughly the standard of welcome here, for people and otherwise.