The Peel Arms is a stone-built pub on Church Road that's been pulling pints for over two hundred years, parts of the building reckoned to go back to the seventeenth century, just off the A53 midway between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Market Drayton, on the route of the 64 bus, which passes roughly once an hour.
Food runs Wednesday to Sunday, split between the bar and a restaurant at the back. The steak ale pie is the one to order — tender steak in crisp pastry — and Sunday brings the full roast, Yorkshire pudding included, with a vegetarian option. CAMRA describes the pub as "now deservedly busy with good food at great prices and quality beers and wines," backed by three regular cask ales — Wainwright Gold, St Austell Tribute, Timothy Taylor Landlord — and a beer garden big enough for a children's play area.
Dogs are welcome in the bar and garden, though not at the table while food's being served, and just outside the rear entrance is a smoking shelter the pub itself has christened the Coughin' Box.
Ashley has no shop of its own — for that you go four miles to Market Drayton, home of gingerbread by its own account.
What Ashley does have is a church too large, historically, for the size of the village around it. St John the Baptist keeps its tower from around 1350; the rest was rebuilt in the 1860s in pink sandstone by the architect J. Ashdown, the interior reworked again in 1910 by G.F. Bodley. Simon Jenkins included it in his guide to England's best churches.
Inside, the Gerard Chapel holds the alabaster tomb of Sir Gilbert Gerard, who died in 1592 after serving Elizabeth I as Attorney General and then Master of the Rolls. His wife, Anne Radcliffe, lies with him, with kneeling figures of their son and grandson added later. One monument shows Thomas, Lord Gerard, carved in alabaster with his wife, their eight children, and his African servant. Six Lords Gerard of Bromley are commemorated here, the last of them dying in 1707.
Across the aisle, the Kinnersley Chapel has six marble monuments to the Kinnersley family, paid for by Thomas Kinnersley of Clough Hall — the finest, of Thomas Kinnersley I, by Francis Chantrey. There's a Wedgwood funeral urn too. Outside, a grass mound near the churchyard has never been excavated; tradition holds it's a Black Death mass grave from the 1340s.
Ashley turns up in the Domesday Book as four households under Earl Roger of Shrewsbury, worth fifteen shillings a year to its lord — six centuries before the same small parish was building marble chapels for its dead.
A circular walk drops from Loggerheads across Ashley Heath and along Mucklestone Wood Lane into the village, crossing the A53 to finish. Mucklestone itself is two and a half miles west, where legend has a blacksmith reshoeing Queen Margaret's horse backwards during the Wars of the Roses to send her pursuers the wrong way.
Ashley Memorial Hall, on Gravelly Hill, has been run by and for the community since 1953: a stage, a kitchen, a bar, seating for about eighty, and a calendar running from ballroom dancing to hog roasts. It's the kind of building a village keeps going out of habit and can't imagine being without.
