A ford runs the length of the cobbled street through the centre of Butterton. Not a picturesque trickle at the edge of things — the Hoo Brook comes down the middle, and cars have to turn and drive along the bed of it before turning out again at the other end. Children paddle where the traffic goes. It is the sort of arrangement most villages tidied away a century ago and Butterton simply kept.
The lanes climbing away from the brook are lined with sandstone cottages, and at the top sits St Bartholomew's Church with the pub next door. This is a small sandstone village in the Staffordshire Moorlands, inside the Peak District, about five miles east of Leek, and it looks out over the Manifold Valley and the bulk of Ecton Hill.
The Black Lion Inn is the one place to eat and drink, and it earns the position. Matt and Hannah Grimsey took it over in June 2019 — Matt cooks, Hannah runs the front — and the food is, in their words, hearty and hand made. The fish and chips comes in a real-ale batter; the pork and feta burger is £12.50, the treacle tart £5.50. Moorlands Eater said "the real ale batter was so light and crispy that ID actually ate all of it which he almost never does." Low beams, open fires, candlelight, and a spacious beer garden that makes sense after a walk. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the garden. There are three en-suite rooms upstairs if you want to stay put.
Almost everything else the village once had is gone. There was a butcher, a general store, a tea room and a post office within living memory; the school closed in 1979 and became the village hall. The loss is part of the character now rather than a wound.
The walking is why most people come. The Manifold Way — a level, traffic-free trail laid along a railway line that closed in 1934 — runs very close, good for bikes and children. From the village you can loop out to Thor's Cave, a vast free-to-enter limestone cavern above the valley, in about six and a half miles. Ecton Hill, all 1,212 feet of it, was copper and lead country from the seventeenth century, worked under the Duke of Devonshire and drained of ore along packhorse routes.
The name means butter hill, from the Old English for the good dairy pasture up here. There was briefly a sulphurous spring at the foot of the village in the 1850s, thought to help with scurvy; it has since vanished, along with the mines and the railway.
The spire on St Bartholomew's went up in 1879 and is, by Wikipedia's account, "one of the newest spires in the Peak District." Inside is a plaque to three men — Joseph Wood, Rowland Cantrill and William Hambleton — who died in 1842 trying to pull Joseph Shenton out of a disused mineshaft.
Every August bank holiday the village holds Butterton Wakes, and has done for over a hundred years, the takings going to the hall and the church.
