Ipstones

Butcher, shop and coaching inn

Will Pearson has been dry-ageing beef behind the counter of The Village Butcher since November 2015, working with native breeds — Aberdeen Angus, Hereford, Longhorn among them — farmed by his family since 1973 at Dunwood Farm. The beef rests a minimum of 28 days before it's cut. There's home-cured bacon and a signature Ipstones Sausage flavoured with apricot, marjoram and chives. One customer is said to drive over from Stafford, twenty miles away, purely for the rib eye. The Village Shop and Post Office has served the community over a hundred years; Ipstones Country Store has supplied local farms for more than two decades.

The Old Red Lion, an eighteenth-century coaching inn on Froghall Road, looks out over the Churnet Valley and serves food most evenings and Sunday lunchtimes, with a real fire, a beer garden and rooms upstairs. Tripadvisor reviewers keep it brief: "Hot, crisp delicious." "BIG portions, dog friendly pub."

Village pubs and a note of caution

Family run since 1999, the Sea Lion Inn on Brookfields Road has a wood-burning stove, pew-style seating, darts and table skittles out the back. It has taken CAMRA's Staffordshire Moorlands Pub of the Season twice, and was highly commended for Village Pub of the Year in 2024, with live music Sunday evenings.

The Marquis of Granby, a 280-year-old Grade II listed pub in the centre, has been closed for some time — check before building an evening around it.

Stone church and open moorland

St Leonard's Church, Grade II* listed, was rebuilt in sandstone in 1789–92 for John Sneyd. The chancel arch and sanctuary carry Art Nouveau wall paintings by J. Eadie Reid, put up in 1917 as a memorial, depicting the Annunciation. Set into the south wall is a carved Norman tympanum, found doing service as infill stone in the rebuild. A writer for the Megalithic Portal read its knotted beasts as Sköll and Hati, "the wolves that battled for the sun and moon in the impending armageddon at the end of the world." Ipstones never made the Domesday Book — the tympanum is the evidence a stone church stood here regardless.

North of the village, Ipstones Edge climbs to 1,250 feet at the south-west tip of the Pennines, and the Staffordshire Way crosses it with views for miles. Below, a 160-acre nature reserve of stunted oak and bilberry covers Swineholes Wood, Black Heath and Casey Bank. A longer walk follows the Caldon Canal past Consall Station and the lime kilns at Consall Forge to Cheddleton.

Connections and village life

Ipstones sits on the road between Froghall and Longnor, six miles from Leek. Its own station closed in 1935; the nearest working one is Stoke-on-Trent, though the heritage Churnet Valley Railway runs close by at Cheddleton. The 29 bus connects Leek and Cheadle through the village on weekdays.

The recreation ground has a refurbished play area, there's a gym that opened in 2015, and the village runs an Agricultural Show, a Christmas Market and a Five Mile Road Race each year. Alton Towers is twenty minutes by car; Consall Nature Park is nearer three miles.

Horace Barks and a journey outward

Horace Barks grew up here. He worked as a train guard, taught himself Esperanto, went into Labour politics, and ended up Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent in 1951, with an OBE to show for it — a fair distance to travel from a village whose own trains stopped running sixteen years earlier.