A silver hunting horn used to hang at Loxley Hall, engraved with the initials R.H. and mounted on silver ferrules and chain, its shield carrying three horseshoes — the arms of the Ferrers family. Tradition called it Robin Hood's Horn. It disappeared during the Second World War, after American soldiers were billeted at the hall, and nobody has seen it since.
Further into the grounds, along the Long Walk, stands Robin Hood's Grotto, a folly knocked together around 1797 from parts of the old hall's facade when the place was rebuilt. It carries carved heraldry from two families who held the manor: a greyhound under a hawthorn for the Kynnersleys, a lion passant guardant for the Sneyds.
Loxley itself has no pub. It's a farming hamlet on the edge of what was once Needwood Forest, and for a drink or a meal you head into neighbouring Bramshall, to the Old Bramshall Inn on Stone Road or the Butcher's Arms. There's no shop here either, no butcher, no bakery — the two villages share almost everything, including their church, St Lawrence's in Bramshall, built in 1835 by Thomas Fradgley of Uttoxeter, ashlar with a slate roof and a crenellated west tower, its altar rail dated to around 1700.
They share a parish hall too, off Church Croft, with a defibrillator bolted to the outside wall and a hall used for toddler groups, bowling, dance aerobics and Zumba depending on the evening. Next to it is a play area and a trim trail, which is about as far as Loxley's amenities extend, and about as far as they need to for a hamlet this size.
What Loxley has instead is farmland — fertile ground in the vale of the Dove, the River Tean running past on its way to join the Dove east of Uttoxeter — and a history disproportionate to its size. Local tradition, recorded by the nineteenth-century historians Erdeswich and Redfern, holds that Robin Hood was born here rather than at the better-known Loxley in South Yorkshire; a family called the Hodes, documented at Loxley in a thirteenth-century survey, are one candidate for the outlaw's real origin. Louis Rhead, writing in 1912, placed him living "on an estate near Locksley village, about two miles from the famous old town of Uttoxeter."
The Domesday Book recorded it as Locheslei, held by a man called Ascelin under Earl Roger of Shrewsbury. The manor later split into the two hamlets that exist now, Loxley Green and Lower Loxley, and the hall passed through the Kynnersleys for close to five hundred years before landing with the Sneyd-Kynnersleys. Loxley Hall still stands, Grade II* listed, Jacobean panelling inside dated 1607 — it's now run by Staffordshire County Council as a special school for boys.
Uttoxeter station sits two or three miles away on the Crewe–Derby line, and the A50 and A518 do the rest of the work getting you here; there's no direct bus into Loxley itself. Alton Towers is under twenty minutes by car, and JCB's headquarters at Rocester is closer still.
Over the county border at Doveridge, in St Cuthbert's churchyard, there's a yew tree reckoned at 1,400 years old, hollow and iron-chained, its branches spreading 250 feet. Tradition says it's where Robin Hood married Clorinda. Nobody who tells you this expects you to believe it. They tell you anyway.
