Marchington

One Pub Left Standing

The Dog & Partridge keeps an open fire lit and a board of meat pies, partridge and fillet steaks running most of the week, and its 1,070-plus Tripadvisor reviews average 4.6 out of 5, which is not a figure many village pubs get near. It's a Georgian building with a CAMRA award, a wine list and gins alongside the ales, and live music on Sundays. Starters run £4.50 to £6, mains £13.50 to £17, the Sunday carvery £10 to £20, and the roasts get singled out for generous portions and proper trimmings. Dogs are welcome in the restaurant, which given the name would be awkward if they weren't. Food runs Wednesday to Sunday only.

Until 2023 there was a second option. The Bulls Head on Bag Lane, a part-Victorian coaching inn with log fires and a beer garden, twice won the Uttoxeter CAMRA Sub-Branch Pub of the Season and poured two regular beers plus two guest ales, mostly from Marston's. It closed permanently that September, leaving the Dog & Partridge doing the work of both.

Cliff Views and Church Stones

The walking starts at the village edge. Marchington Cliff is a short, sharp climb — about a kilometre, seventy-odd vertical metres, up to 151m — for a panoramic sweep across the Midlands out of proportion to the climb. The wider Hanbury parish, which Marchington sits within, carries 329 footpaths totalling 94km, plus 8.5km of bridleway, and a circular route takes in Hanbury Church nearby. Marchington calls itself a gateway to the wooded Churnet Valley.

St Peter's is Grade II* and younger than it looks: the current building went up in 1744, after parishioners spent 1734 fearing the old chapel would collapse in a storm. They costed a rebuild at £1,154, raised £400, and got a more modest brick church instead, built with timbers and box-pews salvaged from the one it replaced. William Bowyer's memorial slab from 1541 lies worn beneath the pulpit, and Sir Walter Vernon (d.1592) has an alabaster family tomb there.

Land, Community and Wartime Echoes

The Domesday entry records fourteen households working seven ploughlands, worth £5 a year to Henry de Ferrers, who held it as part of the earldom of Derby until a Ferrers descendant rebelled against the Crown and lost the lot. An earlier document, from AD 951, records King Eadred granting the same land to a man called Wulfhelm.

The village hall on the square runs a full calendar of shows and private bookings, with a stage and catering kitchen; there's a cricket club by the Beacon and Silver Lane Recreation Park, and a tennis and bowls club with two courts and a crown green. The vicarage, incidentally, spent the 1940s as a US Army headquarters and then a prisoner-of-war camp — not obvious from the outside now.

Getting Here and Going Further

Marchington's own station closed in 1958; the nearest now is Uttoxeter, three or four miles south, with the A50 for the traffic and the 402 bus for everyone else. From Uttoxeter it's about six miles to Sudbury Hall and about ten to Alton Towers, and the Dog & Partridge markets itself as a stop-off for the latter.

The Chess-Playing Vicar

One former vicar, John Owen, was also an amateur chess master in his spare time — a fact nobody in the village seems especially inclined to make a fuss about, which feels about right for the place.