Canal, church and old manor
Acton Trussell
A small Penk Valley village where a medieval moat meets the canal, a church stands over a Roman villa and countryside walks begin at the towpath.
- Best for
- Canal walking, church history and a memorable meal
- Give it
- Editorial estimate: a half day in the village; longer with Shugborough
- Don't miss
- The four-mile Acton Trussell and Bednall Circular
Photo: Roger Kidd · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with unusually deep layers
Come for a four-mile canal-and-field walk, a church above a Roman villa and the village's one pub, set on a medieval moated site.
Acton Trussell is residential and short on everyday amenities, but its few visitor anchors are distinctive: the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal absorbed two arms of the Moat House moat; St James' occupies a Roman villa site; and the official circular links towpath with farmland around Bednall. Add a meal at The Moat House, or follow the Anson connection to nearby Shugborough.
Where to go
Places in Acton Trussell
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 places
Start here
The Moat House
The village's only pub combines a four-star hotel, working bar and two-AA-Rosette Orangery with an early-16th-century timber-framed wing on a medieval moated site beside the canal.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes for food or a drink
- Locality
- Acton Trussell
- Access
- Dogs are welcome in the bar, and dog-friendly bedrooms are available.
Acton Trussell and Bednall Circular Walk
An official Staffordshire County Council route beginning on the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal before crossing farmland around Bednall and Acton Trussell.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours for the four-mile route
- Locality
- Acton Trussell and Bednall
- Access
- An easy-going mix of towpath and field paths; use the official route page before setting out.
Acton Mill Bridge
An 18th-century stone bridge whose three arches carry Mill Lane across the River Penk.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 15 minutes
- Locality
- Mill Lane
- Access
- A brief look while passing through; take care around road traffic.
History & heritage
2 places
St James' Church
A Grade II* church with surviving fabric from around 1300, standing over a Romano-British villa whose stone dining-room footings and later apsidal wing were found by archaeologists.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Acton Trussell
- Access
- Check the church's official page before making a dedicated visit.
Shugborough Estate
A Georgian mansion and parkland connected to Acton Trussell through the Anson family, which held the village manor from 1658.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 3 hours
- Locality
- Shugborough
- Access
- Check the official site before travel.
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Three ways to explore Acton Trussell
Signature outings
A Church Above a Roman Villa
Look beyond St James' medieval fabric to the villa site beneath church and graveyard, where excavations uncovered dining-room footings and Roman coins.
Timber, Water and the Orangery
Pause at The Moat House for its working bar or two-AA-Rosette restaurant beside an early-16th-century wing and the surviving arms of a medieval moat.
The Anson Connection
Pair the village with Shugborough's Georgian mansion and parkland, home of the Anson family that held Acton Trussell's manor from 1658.
The village story
Acton Trussell Village Guide
Moat, canal, Roman villa and manor history meet in a Staffordshire village with one remarkably substantial place to eat.
The Moat and the House
The Moat House stands on what's left of an island. Its oldest wing, a four-bay, two-storey timber-framed range from the early 16th century, sits inside a medieval moat that once ran around all four sides of the site. When the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal was cut through in the later 18th century, it swallowed the moat's southern and western arms; the two arms that remain, with the moated island itself, are a Scheduled Ancient Monument, traceable from the towpath.
The hotel built around that timber wing is family-run, by the Lewis Partnership, and it's the only pub in the village; there's no shop or butcher either, and villagers shop in Penkridge or Stafford. The Moat House has 41 bedrooms and a beer garden, and opens 9am to 11pm daily, food served noon to 2pm and 5:30 to 9:30pm, Sundays until 9.
Dining and the Towpath
The restaurant, the Orangery, holds two AA Rosettes, which for a village this size is a fair amount of cutlery to keep polished. Reviewers mention a parsnip velouté amuse-bouche, beetroot panna cotta, a duck and butternut squash pithivier, and a Sunday lunch with beef or chicken; a three-course set menu has been reported at £30 a head. TripAdvisor rates it 4 out of 5 — the only hotel in the village, so no real competition, but reviewers mean it: "the ambience is delightful, the service is attentive and the food is some of the best," wrote one, though others note the kitchen can slow on a busy sitting. Three real ales are kept at the bar, Wainwright Amber the regular plus two changing guests from breweries including Black Sheep and Greene King. Dogs are welcome in the bar, with dog-friendly bedrooms too.
For a walk, the towpath is the obvious start. The Acton Trussell and Bednall Circular is an official four-mile route beginning on the canal — "one of the oldest in the country" — before crossing farmland around Bednall. Park at the lay-by by Parkgate Bridge on Teddesley Road, or just follow the towpath north into Stafford, or south to Penkridge alongside the River Penk.
A Church Above a Roman Villa
St James' Church stands apart from the rest of the village, which puzzled local archaeologists enough in the 1970s that they started fieldwalking the churchyard. In 1984 they found out why: church and graveyard sit on a Romano-British villa, first built in the 1st century AD and rebuilt in stone in the 2nd, its dining room footings still in the ground. Two 3rd-century coins turned up in a dig that ran on and off for almost thirty years.
The church was founded in 1212, though the oldest stonework standing now dates from around 1300; G. E. Street restored and enlarged it in 1869. The churchyard holds Commonwealth war graves from both World Wars.
Actone, the Ansons and Stackton Tressel
Domesday recorded the village as Actone: eighteen households, a mill worth two shillings, and a value to the lord that crept from five shillings in 1066 to a pound by 1086. The Trussell family, Norman lords, gave the village its name; the manor passed by marriage to the Earls of Oxford, then by 1658 to the Ansons of Shugborough.
Penkridge station is two and a half miles off, and Junction 13 of the M6 puts Stafford and the West Midlands within easy reach. The village's other export is a drag act. Patrick Fyffe, born here in 1942, became one half of Hinge and Bracket, and named his fictional stage village Stackton Tressel after his own.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
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Silkwood House | Boutique 4 Bed nr. Peak District
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:The Church of St James at Acton Trussell, Staffordshire - geograph.org.uk - 5370507.jpg — photograph by Roger Kidd; The Church of St James at Acton Trussell, Staffordshire by Roger Kidd. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
- File:The Moat House near Acton Trussell in Staffordshire - geograph.org.uk - 6896445.jpg — photograph by Roger D Kidd; The Moat House near Acton Trussell in Staffordshire by Roger D Kidd. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Moat House — moathouse.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St James' Church — achurchnearyou.com national body or asset manager
- Acton Trussell and Bednall Circular Walk — staffordshire.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Acton Mill Bridge — britishlistedbuildings.co.uk national body or asset manager
- Shugborough Estate — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager