Stanton

The View from St Mary's

A bench at the back of St Mary's Church looks south towards Cannock Chase and west to the Weaver Hills, and a blogger who writes as Walks with Welf reckoned it "a finer pack-up spot" than most, adding that if you watch the view from there "you'll think you've curled up your toes and gone to a better place." That is roughly what Stanton offers: not much to do, and a very good place to sit and look at it.

The church itself is younger than it looks — built in 1846-47 by W. Evans of Manchester, in the Early English style, on a site that had never had a church before. Villagers used to walk more than two miles to St Peter's at Ellastone to worship. Inside, the chancel arch has foliate capitals and zig-zag moulding, the pulpit is carved with quatrefoils and dog-tooth pattern, and the font is cut in an early-Christian style. It is Grade II listed and gets a mention in Pevsner.

Where the Pub Used to Be

There is no pub. There hasn't been one since 1946, and no shop either. The post office closed in 2001, the same year the census counted 232 people living here. For food and a pint, Ellastone, the next village over, has the Duncombe Arms; for a market town with more choice, Ashbourne is about three and a half miles away.

The Weaver Hills

What Stanton has instead is the hills. The village sits at the eastern end of the Weaver Hills, on Carboniferous limestone, with the trig point known locally as "The Walk" reaching 371 metres. On a clear day the view runs to Rugeley power station, the JCB factory at Rocester, and reportedly as far as the Malverns. Alton Towers is visible to the west. Thorswood Nature Reserve, 200 acres of hay meadow and limestone grassland run by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, adjoins the village; hares are common on the lower slopes, and there's a circular stone seat at the highest point, built with local schoolchildren and volunteers. Walkers heading for Ellastone pass Ousley Cross, the base and shaft of a probable 15th-century waymark on the old pilgrimage route to St Bertram's shrine at Ilam.

From Stantone to Sheldon

The Domesday Book recorded the place as Stantone — a stone farmstead — with one ploughland and, unusually, no villagers listed at all. Its one famous resident is Gilbert Sheldon, born here in 1598, who became Archbishop of Canterbury and founded the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. His birthplace still stands in the centre of the village. Lead and copper were mined at Thorswood from 1729 to 1860, some shafts sunk to 640 feet, and the local sandstone was quarried extensively enough to build Ilam Hall down the road. The old village school closed in 1983 and reopened a decade later as Gilbert Sheldon Hall, which is where anything communal in Stanton now happens.

Arriving in Stanton

Uttoxeter station is nearest, about nine miles off; there's a bus stop in the village but nothing that stops at it. Most people arrive by the A52 and B5032, past a Grade II listed cast-iron milepost that has stood there since the Victorians started measuring the distance to somewhere else. In 1953 someone digging in the parish turned up a gold bracelet from around 800 BC. It's in the Potteries Museum in Stoke now. The hares are still here.