Ipstones

Butcher and coaching inn

Between November 2015 and 2022, Will Pearson ran The Village Butcher in Ipstones, selling native-breed beef from his family's Dunwood Farm. His family has farmed there since 1973, raising Aberdeen Angus, Hereford and Longhorn cattle. The shop's beef was dry-aged for at least 28 days; its range included home-cured bacon and Ipstones Sausage flavoured with apricot, marjoram and chives. One customer made the twenty-mile journey from Stafford for rib eye. In 2022 Dunwood sold the shop to another local butcher.

The Old Red Lion, an eighteenth-century coaching inn on Froghall Road, looks over the Churnet Valley. It has a pub food menu, real ales, a fire, a garden and bed-and-breakfast rooms.

A village pub and two shops

Family-run since 1999, the Sea Lion Inn on Brookfields Road has a wood-burning stove, pew-style seating, darts and table skittles. It won Staffordshire Moorlands Pub of the Season awards in 2015 and 2024 and was highly commended for Village Pub of the Year in 2024.

The Village Shop and Post Office has served Ipstones for more than a century. Ipstones Country Store supplies local farms and has more than two decades of experience.

Stone church and open moorland

St Leonard's Church, Grade II* listed, was rebuilt in sandstone in 1789–92 for John Sneyd. Its chancel arch and sanctuary carry Art Nouveau wall paintings by J. Eadie Reid, installed as a memorial in 1917 and depicting the Annunciation. A carved Norman tympanum, found reused as infill stone from the earlier church, now sits in the south interior wall. Its animals have been likened to the Norse wolves Sköll and Hati. Ipstones is absent from the Domesday Book, but the early twelfth-century carving preserves evidence of an earlier stone church.

North of the village, Ipstones Edge climbs to 1,250 feet at the south-west tip of the Pennines, with views for miles. Paths from the layby beside Swineholes Wood lead through stunted oak and bilberry; Black Heath and Casey Bank form the nature reserve's other two parcels, together covering more than 160 acres. For a longer valley walk, follow the Caldon Canal past Consall Station and the lime kilns at Consall Forge towards 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 Blythe Bridge, 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 Resort is about 5.3 miles from Ipstones in a straight line, with a longer road journey; Consall Nature Park is roughly three miles away.

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.