The Staffordshire Knot Inn takes bookings only, and the menu changes by the day depending on what the chef could source that morning. It is the one pub in Sheen: a stone inn with a 16th-century exterior, log fires and candlelight, run by head chef and owner Jacqui Allsebrook. Starters run to baked cheeses, mussels, and mushroom in tarragon; mains to steak, rack of lamb and fish. There is a Sunday roast, and they cater for children. Round the back sits a large car park and a quiet beer garden.
The pub has been trading since the early 1830s as a coaching inn, then called The Horse Shoe and kept in the mid-19th century by the village blacksmith, John Woolley — the pub and the forge sharing a trade. The Staffordshire Knot name has been used since before 1872. It is registered with CAMRA, serves real ale, and holds Asset of Community Value status.
That is more or less it, because Sheen is a one-street hamlet — the pub, the church, a handful of cottages and several working farms, strung along a ridge just out of sight of Hartington on the Staffordshire side of the River Dove. There are no shops. For food you drive the two miles to Hartington and the Old Cheese Shop, which has sold cheese for over fifty years.
The walking is the reason to be here. Sheen Hill rises to 380 metres behind the village, with a concessionary path to the trig point and views over the upper Dove and Manifold valleys — about a six-mile circuit from the door. Longer routes take in Pilsbury Castle, an Iron Age and later motte-and-bailey earthwork guarding the Dove, and come back along the Manifold Trail. A footpath heading south-east was once the road to Hartington, crossing the Dove at Pool Hall bridge.
There is no station; the Manifold Valley line closed long ago. Buxton and its trains are twelve miles off, and the buses are the sort you plan around rather than rely on.
The church is St Luke's, Grade II* listed, with 12th-century fabric in the north aisle under a great deal of Victorian rebuilding. Most of that was paid for by A. J. B. Beresford Hope, who inherited the estate around 1850 and set out to make Sheen "the Athens of the Moorlands" — funding the church, a Butterfield vicarage, a school, and a reading room open from 1856 to 1889. The Ecclesiologist decided "the general effect is that of an ecclesiastical colony in the wilds of Australia."
St Luke's has one quiet distinction. It was the last building Nikolaus Pevsner recorded for his 45-volume Buildings of England, begun in 1945, when he visited on the morning of Tuesday 6 October 1970. The project ended here.
The Domesday surveyors reached Sheen too, and recorded it with no households at all. A chapel is documented by 1185. The name may come from the Old English for shelters, or for beautiful; on a ridge between two rivers, either fits.
The pub's attitude to dogs is harder to pin down. One family brought theirs to a celebration without any trouble; another was turned down for a table for two with a golden retriever, on the grounds of the hair it would leave. Best to ask first.
