Onecote

A river through the pub garden

The River Hamps runs through the beer garden of the Jervis Arms, which you now reach from the car park over a new wooden footbridge. It tells you where you are: a moorland village where the pub garden has a river in it and someone had to build a bridge to get a drink there.

The pub is 17th-century and family-run, and for a while it was neither open nor certain to reopen. It closed through the Covid lockdowns and then through staffing shortages, and stayed shut until Richard and Kirsten took the keys in March 2024. They spent four months on a major refurbishment and opened the doors again that July.

The kitchen does home-cooked food with daily specials. Starters run to pressed ham hock at £7.95 and handmade duck spring rolls at £9.50. The mains include a mixed bean cottage pie, a pork belly special, roast rump of lamb, and the "Jervis Proper Pie" of chicken, ham and leek. Friday is fish and chips. Moorlands Eater called the dishes "generously portioned" with "great flavours — the sort of thing I want to eat in a pub on a chilly autumn evening."

Ale and the admiral

There are five hand pumps, J.W. Lees Bitter among them at £4.60 a pint, and the place took CAMRA's Staffordshire Moorlands Pub of the Season in spring 2019. Dogs are welcome in the bar and lounge. A 70-seat dining room at the rear can be hired out.

The pub is named after Admiral John Jervis, Earl St Vincent, born a few miles away at Meaford in 1734.

Practicalities and St Luke's

There is no shop, no butcher, no farm shop. For those you go to Leek, about four miles down the B5053. The bus is a bookable, demand-responsive service covering Leek, Ashbourne and Buxton, with no fixed timetable — which is another way of saying you'll want a car.

The Church of St Luke is a listed building put up in the earlier 1750s, ashlar-built and paid for by public subscription. Inside there is a pulpit with a tester dated 1753–5, a George II Coat of Arms of 1754, and a painted Commandment Board from 1755 showing Moses, Aaron and Joshua. The parish registers begin the same year.

Anecote and the Bleak House link

Onecote is not in the Domesday Book. The name first turns up in 1199 as "Anecote," which the record has as "a hut or cottage on its own." The settlement grew up afterwards, where the Hamps meets the Westbrook.

The village has one literary claim. A Leek solicitor, William Challinor, drew on a real local inheritance dispute — rooted in the 1816 will of Thomas Cook of Lane Ends Farm — for an 1849 pamphlet on the failings of the Court of Chancery, which he sent to Charles Dickens. Dickens acknowledged him when Bleak House came out in book form.

Morridge, the hall and polar bears

The walking starts at the door. The track climbs to the high moorland road of Morridge, and a typical circuit runs about eight miles past Upper Green Farm and Mixon. Merryton Low, to the north, has a trig point at 1,604 feet and a Bronze Age barrow.

The schoolhouse of 1870 is now the village hall. The census counted 220 people in 2011, scattered across a parish seven miles long. Less than two miles away, at Peak Wildlife Park, there are polar bears.