The Old Crown Hotel looks bigger from the road than it turns out to be inside — a snug bar on one side, a larger lounge on the other, joined by a long passage, stone-built and dating to 1647, on a corner of Leek Road opposite the turn-off for the Manifold Track cycle-hire centre. It was a coaching inn on the old Ashbourne–Manchester stagecoach route, Grade II listed, CAMRA-recognised. Food runs Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime — Sunday roast beef or gammon, cauliflower cheese, scampi, homemade lasagne, sausage and mash for the children at £8.50 — alongside Sharp's Atlantic on regular cask and a rotating guest ale. A reviewer singled out staff member Ewan for pulling "a decent pint" with "great local knowledge"; others have grumbled about slow kitchen service and late-night noise. It's on the A523, eight miles from both Leek and Ashbourne, on the 108 bus route between them, with Alton Towers a ten-minute drive away.
Turn right at the Old Crown and it's about a mile to Cauldon and the Yew Tree Inn, which landlord Alan East filled with antiques after knocking its four rooms into one in 1960 — guns, pianos, penny farthings, working pianolas, a function room upstairs seating 200 more of his collectables. There's table skittles, shove ha'penny, darts and dominoes, a monthly quiz, folk nights, a pub dog, and Burton Bridge's Bridge Bitter on the pump.
Back in Waterhouses, the Riverside Cafe on Leek Road does takeaway Staffordshire oatcakes and Cornish pasties from bench seating outside, plus scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream. The post office is a little further along at the Community Bungalow on Waterfall Lane, and Brown End Farm hires out mountain bikes for £12–£15 and children's bikes and buggies for £7–£9, helmets free, with direct access onto the Manifold Track, Easter to the end of September.
The track is the reason cyclists and walkers come here at all: 8.5 miles of tarmac, flat enough for wheelchairs and pushchairs, laid on the bed of the old narrow-gauge Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway, which ran from Waterhouses to Hulme End between 1904 and 1934. It passes Wetton Mill, where the River Manifold vanishes underground and doesn't resurface until Ilam Hall five miles on, and comes close to Thor's Cave, which has turned up evidence of use from the Stone Age through the Roman period.
The station here did something no other interchange in Britain did: standard-gauge wagons were rolled onto transporter wagons to cross onto the narrow gauge, moving around 300 milk churns a day and, from 1919, a daily milk train to London. The line closed in 1934, the station in 1943. The parish itself only dates to 1934, assembled from Calton, Cauldon, Waterfall and part of Ilam — though the area held a market charter back in 1308.
Cauldon's Church of St Mary and St Lawrence went up as a chapel-of-ease in 1781–4, with some 14th-century material worked into the chancel and a coat of arms of George IV dated 1829 inside.
The swimming pool at Waterhouses C of E Primary Academy started life open-air in 1967, paid for by the village itself, and didn't get a roof until 1974. It's still there, still running public sessions, seventy-five feet of it, the sort of thing a place builds when it decides it wants one.
