The Jubilee Chapel stands across the lane from Chapel Farm, and it is, by Wikipedia's account, the only surviving public building in Ramshorn. Built in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, its pulpit was rescued from another meeting house near The Roaches. It's privately owned now, restored roughly ten years ago, and still holds the odd service.
That one building tells you most of what you need to know about the place. Ramshorn has no pub, no shop, no post office — a scattering of stone cottages, barns and farm buildings in the gap between the River Dove valley and the Weaver Hills, about two miles north of Alton Towers, reached by minor lanes off the B5032 and B5030. No A-road comes anywhere near it.
For a pint or a meal you go elsewhere, and elsewhere isn't far. The Star at Cotton, near Oakamoor, five minutes from Alton Towers, is a dog-friendly gastropub with cask ales and a Sunday sharing roast board: Staffordshire Pub of the Year (Bronze), and Staff Canteen Awards 2021 Front of House winner. The Cricketers Arms is also in Oakamoor. Three miles east in Ellastone, the Duncombe Arms sits by St Peter's, where Ramshorn's own parishioners worship.
For food to take home, Dalton's Dairy is next door in Wootton, the neighbouring hamlet in the same parish. Family-run and award-winning: milk and butter from grass-fed cows, handmade ice cream, an honesty shop. In summer they open the Hatch, a coffee-and-ice-cream window doing hot chocolate, milkshakes and mini-egg ice cream.
If you'd rather not leave at all, Ramshorn Estate has woodland lodges sleeping up to 14 with private hot tubs, built on the promise of quiet and a short drive to the rollercoasters.
Walking is the other reason to come. The route up the Weaver Hills starts on Gidacre Lane past a cricket club and ends at a trig point generally reckoned to be the southernmost outpost of the Pennines. Christopher Somerville, writing it up for the Times, said that from the summit "a tremendous prospect unfolded round the compass" — limestone peaks north into the Peak District, the Midland plain south across the Dove Valley.
The history is out of proportion to what's left standing. Hugh Bourne first came to Ramsor — the old spelling — in May 1808. That October, at the Ramsor Camp Meeting, William Clowes preached his first sermon "from a text." Bourne and Clowes went on to found Primitive Methodism, and Ramsor became one of its head-of-circuit villages in 1822. Clowes kept attending camp meetings here until 1810, when the Wesleyans expelled him for it.
Elizabeth Wain, a local convert, was said to have been healed after six years on crutches. Richard Jukes, who wrote the hymn "My Heart is Fixed, Eternal God," preached at Ramsor between 1834 and 1838. None of it needed a church of any size — the meetings were held in fields, and the chapel came later.
The nearest station is Uttoxeter, about ten miles by road; a seasonal bus, the 32A, links Oakamoor, Denstone, Rocester and Alton Towers.
What's left is mostly quiet: a farm or two, a trig point with a view a professional walker thought worth writing down, and a chapel with a borrowed pulpit that somebody still unlocks for a service now and then.
