The canal simply stops at Froghall Wharf. Eighteen miles after leaving the Trent & Mersey at Etruria, it runs out of valley and out of canal, ending in a basin ringed by lime kilns and old warehouses, the wooded sides of the Churnet Valley rising steeply behind.
One of those warehouses, Grade II listed and around 200 years old, is now Hetty's Tea Shop: homemade scones, oatcakes with a choice of fillings, cooked breakfasts and pancakes, sourced locally where they can manage it. A visitor centre in the old stables next door sells local-history leaflets, staffed by volunteers when available. The village itself is barely older than the canal — Froghall doesn't appear in the Domesday Book, and grew instead from 1778 as a place where things arrived by tramway and left by boat.
The Railway Inn stands by the station: open-plan bar, wood burner, darts, five en-suite rooms, two hand pumps drawing on local breweries like Uttoxeter Brewing Company and Titanic. CAMRA's most recent listing has it closed long-term, manager moved out, no new owner found — though its Facebook page and TripAdvisor suggest otherwise. Ring ahead before planning an evening around it.
Better to walk it off. The towpath south runs to Consall Forge, a 7.2-mile circular route through Consall Nature Park — 479 acres of woodland trails, ponds and streams, much of it a Site of Special Scientific Interest — before a climb to Kingsley Banks for a view back down the valley. Christopher Somerville, walking the same stretch, wrote of "the silver strip of the Caldon Canal whose barges once shifted locally mined ironstone to Froghall."
At the far end is the Black Lion, between the river, canal and railway line, with a Saturday grill night — starter and rib-eye for £18.95 — regular hog roasts, and a cider list good enough to have won Staffordshire Moorlands CAMRA Cider Pub of the Year several times, including 2024. Walk back, or catch the heritage railway to Kingsley & Froghall, the only station Froghall has — there's been no National Rail service here since the 1960s.
The wharf's real business was limestone, brought down from the quarries at Cauldon Low by four successive tramroads, the last built in 1847–49 by James Trubshaw — a self-acting system in which loaded wagons descending on a cable hauled the empty ones back up. It ran until about 1920, the stone crushed and burnt in the kilns still standing at the basin.
Thomas Bolton & Sons made copper wire here, headquartered at Froghall from 1940; wire from this works went into the first transatlantic and cross-Channel telegraph cables, and later into Spitfires. It closed in 2014, after an explosion, a pension shortfall and the loss of a customer worth 70% of the order book.
Holy Trinity Church, built 1832 and Grade II listed, is said locally to perch precariously on a steep slope, which from below looks about right.
The A52 runs through for anyone driving from Stoke or Ashbourne; Aimee's Travel runs buses to Leek and Cheadle, two miles off, with markets three days a week. Alton Towers is a fifteen-minute drive.
None of it announces itself. The kilns are just there at the water's edge, the warehouse just happens to sell you a scone now, and the canal, having done its job, has nowhere left to go.
