Wootton

The Lodge and Hamlet Life

A herd of red deer grazes the park at Wootton Lodge, visible from the footpaths that skirt it, though the Lodge itself is not open to visitors. It is a half-basement house of 1611, mullioned and transomed windows throughout, built for Sir Richard Fleetwood, who went on to become High Sheriff of Staffordshire. The architect is thought to have been Robert Smythson, the man behind Hardwick Hall and Wollaton Hall, which puts a small Staffordshire hamlet in unlikely company.

There is no pub in Wootton itself, and no shop either — it is a hamlet within Ellastone parish rather than a village with its own high street. The nearest pub is the Duncombe Arms in Ellastone, a mile and a half away, which holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and takes rooms if you want to stay the night. Food shopping means a short drive to Ellastone or Denstone.

Faith and High Ground

Wootton has no church of its own either. Villagers have used St Peter's in neighbouring Ellastone since at least 1163: a tower from 1586, an octagonal font on a stepped base, a badly mutilated sixteenth-century alabaster tomb with two reclining effigies. The Evans family graves are in the churchyard — relatives of George Eliot, who used Ellastone as the model for Hayslope in Adam Bede.

Above the hamlet the Weaver Hills rise steeply, and a green lane climbs from Wootton past the site of Wootton Hall, demolished around 1930 and now marked by nothing more than the lane itself. From the summit the view runs north into the White Peak and south across the Midland plain.

Rousseau and the Lodge

Wootton Hall was designed, reputedly, by Inigo Jones for the Davenport family, and in March 1766 it took in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had fled persecution in Geneva and France. He stayed over a year, wrote the opening books of his Confessions there, and worked in a grotto in the grounds. He wrote to a friend soon after arriving: "You see already, my dear patron, by the date of my letter, that I am arrived at the place of my destination; but you cannot see all the charms which I find in it." The grotto's facade survives at Consall Hall Gardens, moved there in 1960 after the Hall itself was pulled down.

Wootton Lodge had its own turn at housing the notorious. Held for the Crown in the Civil War, it was damaged in a Parliamentary siege in 1643. In the 1930s Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford rented it as their home, after a wedding in Berlin they kept secret for two years. Around 1960 it was bought by Joseph Cyril Bamford, founder of JCB, and it remains with his family, part of the estate now a JCB vehicle testing track.

From Wodetone to the Road

The Domesday Book recorded the place as Wodetone, King's land in 1086 — the name is Old English for wood farmstead. By the 2011 census the population had settled at 154.

Uttoxeter, eight miles off on the Crewe–Derby line, is the nearest station; the 409 bus runs between Uttoxeter and Ashbourne via Ellastone. Wootton sits about a mile and a half off the B5032, and satnavs occasionally try to send drivers down Wootton Lane near Alton Towers, which is narrow and unsuited to most cars.

Evening at the Tree Line

In the evenings the deer in the Lodge park move down toward the tree line, and the lane above the hamlet stays exactly as quiet as it was when Rousseau found it, minus the persecution.