The Swan Inn is the last pub standing on this stretch of the B5470. There were once five along the road between Macclesfield and Whaley Bridge — the Rising Sun, the Robin Hood, the Highwayman, the Bull's Head and the Swan — and Kettleshulme itself had two. The Bull's Head became houses in 2010. The Swan is what's left, and the reason it's still a pub at all is that in 2004 twenty-one residents bought it to stop it being turned into someone's private home. Great British Life called it "a pioneering former community pub."
It's an 18th-century family-owned free house with a log fire and a conservatory dining extension bolted on the back. The speciality is fish and seafood, delivered six days a week, which is why the menus are printed fresh each day — they reflect whatever actually arrived. There are home-made puddings, freshly ground coffee, Sunday lunch, and three rotating guest ales that tend to come from Bowland, Storm or Wincle. It was a finalist in the 2023 Cheshire Life Food & Drink Awards. Two patios out back, dogs welcome, and three en-suite bedrooms if you want to stay above the pub. Book a table; the place is small.
The Swan flooded in August 2019 and reopened that December. This is the sort of village where you know the exact date the pub came back.
Kettleshulme sits at around 1,000 feet in the valley of Todd Brook, on the Cheshire–Derbyshire border, below the steep slopes of Whaley Moor. Windgather Rocks, Pym Chair, Sponds Hill and Taxal Edge all rise nearby, which means the walking is the main reason to be here. The Ramblers' 6.5-mile Taxal Edge and Windgather circular climbs to the viewpoints and drops into the Todd Brook valley past what they describe as "cute Jenkin Chapel and breeze-riffled haymeadows." There are reservoir trails at Errwood and Fernilee, a footpath to Lyme Park's deer park (about an hour on foot, free to walk the grounds), and another to Whaley Bridge in forty minutes.
There is no shop. The Village Memorial Hall does the community work — events, touring theatre, the start line of the annual Fell Race, which the primary school organises and keeps the profits from.
The industry here was candlewick, until the mills fell silent in 1937. Lumbhole Mill, also called Grove Mill, is the survivor — Grade II* listed and, in English Heritage's words, "the last example of a mill where water-powered and steam machinery were used together and survive intact." Up on the hilltops there's a Bronze Age standing stone known as the Murder Stone, and the Dipping Stone, a gritstone boulder with two rainwater basins that once formed the base of a cross.
Kettleshulme barely registers in the record. When the Domesday surveyors reached this corner of upland Cheshire in 1086 they marked eight townships in the parish as "Waste" — no value, no people, no livestock, still emptied out after the harrying of the north.
For a place with a seven-foot beard in its history — Amos Broadhurst, a 19th-century villager, grew one — the modern flourish is quieter: the Women's Institute makes the well dressing each spring, pictures built from flower petals.
