Oakamoor

Pints beside the brook

The Cricketers Arms, on the Square, doesn't serve food — bar snacks, at most. What it has is Hancock's HB on the regular pump, Marston's Pedigree and Sharp's Doom Bar rotating through the guest lines, a beer garden running down to a brook, and a games room stocked with pool, darts, skittles, crib and dominoes. Dogs get actual treats. The monthly charity quiz has raised more than £40,000 for the Dougie Mac hospice over ten years, and in 2017 Staffordshire Moorlands CAMRA highly commended it as Pub of the Year.

That's about it for eating out in the village. There's no butcher, deli or bakery, and the post office counter in the village hall opens two hours on a Friday. What Oakamoor has instead is the valley around it.

Into the wooded valley

Walk out past the Square and you're in Dimmingsdale within minutes: sandstone outcrops, wooded dells, streams dropping into small waterfalls, bluebells in season and a nickname — Little Switzerland, or the Fairy Glen — that the terrain more or less earns. The Rambler's Retreat tearoom has served homemade food at the Dimmingsdale car park since 1981 — the closest thing to a village restaurant, even if not quite in the village.

For a longer walk, Christopher Somerville's 7½-mile Churnet Valley route starts and finishes at the Oakamoor car park, threading Cotton Dell and a pink stone folly called Rock Cottage before lunch at the Sneyds Arms in Whiston. He described the riverside meadows here as full of "meadowsweet, grasses and Himalayan balsam to walk through, every flower-head and grass stalk a holding pen for jewel-coated beetles, snails and spiders." The old railway line, closed in 1967, is now the Churnet Way, usable by cyclists and horse riders too, running through to Alton and Denstone.

Copper, cable and river

Oakamoor Park, on Mill Lane, is a riverside play area and picnic site built on what used to be Thomas Bolton's copperworks. There's a cricket club too, at the Davies/Worthington ground.

Bolton bought the copperworks site in 1851 and drew copper wire here that went into the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, and later into Spitfires. The factory buildings came down in 1966; the river and weir are what's left, along with mason's marks on Oakamoor Bridge, cut by the men who built a blast furnace here in 1592 and abandoned it nine months later. Time Team dug the site in 2004 and found no trace of it — thought to lie under Oldfurnace Cottage.

Church, weather and connections

Holy Trinity Church, built in 1832 to a design by J.P. Pritchett of York, has a crenellated west tower and a basement that doubles as the church hall, on account of the sloping site. Clement Wragge went to the church school here, raised by his grandmother, before he grew up to become the meteorologist who started naming cyclones after people.

Buses run on the D&G 32A between Stoke-on-Trent and Uttoxeter via Cheadle and Alton Towers; the nearest stations are Blythe Bridge, Stoke and Uttoxeter, Oakamoor's own having closed in 1967.

Wire fairies, full circle

In Star Wood, a sculptor named Robin has been hiding wire fairies along the paths since a one-off show at the village festival in 2012. A business called FantasyWire grew out of it — wire, again, in a village that used to draw it for a living.