Warslow

Beer from behind the bar

The Greyhound Inn brews its own beer round the back. The plant is two barrels, which is small even by micro-brewery standards, and it produces cask ales named after the hills you can see from the village: Ecton Copper, Manifold Mild, Firey Fred, Thor, Kinsey Stout. Lee Wilson-Hart and Dave Wilson started it in 2020 and were selling commercially by 2023. Three of the pub's five hand pulls pour their own; the other two are usually Beartown or Peakstones.

The inn itself dates to around 1750 and sits on Leek Road. It went back to being a free house in January 2019 and is family-run, with six double ensuite rooms and a function room after a recent renovation. The kitchen sources its meat from Manor Farm in Sheen and does homemade pies and burgers, and a Sunday roast with two meats or, if you'd rather, veggie sausages or a potato and spinach pie. There's a roast special — garlic creamy mushrooms, roast beef, a glass of wine — at £19. TripAdvisor has it at 4.4 from around 440 reviews.

A welcome with few provisions

Dogs are welcome, and the pub is plain about it: "Dogs are all warmly welcomed." There's a beer garden with picnic tables and flower beds. It won the local CAMRA Pub of the Season in summer 2020 and was highly commended for Village Pub of the Year in 2023.

You will want the pub, because there isn't much else in the way of provisions. The post office and the shop have both closed, so there is no general store. At Hulme End, about 1.2 miles from Warslow in a straight line, the Tea Junction has parking, toilets and access to the Manifold Way.

Railway trackbed, cave views and estate history

The Manifold Way is the old Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway, its trackbed now given over to walkers, cyclists and horses. The line closed long ago; the valley it ran through is the reason to come. The most popular route from the village is a 7.2-mile loop that takes in the view from above Thor's Cave, a gaping cavern in the limestone across the valley. Closer to home, Revidge rises to the north-west, its summit marked by a trig point and the remains of a dragon-shaped cairn.

Warslow was an estate village of the Harpur-Crewe family of Calke Abbey. Sir George Crewe built Warslow Hall in 1830 as somewhere to stay during the shooting season. The population peaked at 854 in 1821, on the back of copper and lead mining at nearby Ecton, and has been quieter since. The Warslow Moors Estate passed to the Peak District National Park Authority in 1986, handed over in lieu of death duties.

St Lawrence and its Morris glass

The church is St Lawrence, built in Georgian style in 1820, with a chancel added in 1908 by Charles Lynam and paid for by Sir Thomas Wardle of Leek. Pevsner noted the unusually wide chancel and the windows, which are by William Morris and Company. It was originally dedicated to St James and quietly re-dedicated by 1850.

Nearly a thousand feet up

The village sits at nearly a thousand feet, on minor roads off the B5054, with no station and buses that mostly carry the older children to school in Leek. The K6 telephone box still stands.