Sandstone, stories and field paths
Ashley
A small Staffordshire village shaped by a monument-rich church, a long-established pub and paths into the surrounding countryside.
- Best for
- Church monuments, village history and a countryside walk
- Give it
- A half day, or longer with a pub meal
- Don't miss
- The Gerard and Kinnersley chapels at St John the Baptist
Photo: Brian Deegan · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with an outsized historical core
Ashley rewards a focused visit built around St John the Baptist, the Peel Arms and a walk through the surrounding countryside.
The church's dense Gerard and Kinnersley monuments provide the strongest reason to stop, while the Peel Arms and the Loggerheads-to-Ashley Heath route make a rounded half day. Blore Heath adds a nearby Wars of the Roses landscape, and the Memorial Hall is useful when a public activity is scheduled.
Where to go
Places in Ashley
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
Church of St John the Baptist
A Grade II* church with a medieval tower, a Victorian pink-sandstone rebuilding and an unusually dense collection of Gerard and Kinnersley family monuments.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 40 minutes
- Locality
- Ashley village
- Access
- Check current church access before travelling; the research does not confirm regular visitor opening.
Ashley Memorial Hall
A community-run hall serving Ashley and Loggerheads since 1953, with a stage, kitchen, bar and a programme of local activities.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 45 minutes for a scheduled activity
- Locality
- Gravelly Hill, Ashley
- Access
- Treat this as a stop only when a suitable public activity is listed; check the hall calendar first.
Blore Heath Battlefield
The nearby landscape of the 1459 Battle of Blore Heath, a major early battle of the Wars of the Roses close to Ashley.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Blore Heath, close to Ashley
- Access
- Use a public access point and current rights-of-way information; do not assume the whole registered area is freely accessible.
Food & drink
1 placeThe Peel Arms
A stone-built village pub with separate drinking areas, a rear restaurant, three regular cask ales and a large beer garden with a children's play area.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 75 minutes for a meal or drink
- Locality
- 83 Church Road, Ashley
- Access
- Check current food service and dog arrangements before travelling.
Walks & outdoors
1 placeAshley Heath and Mucklestone Wood Lane walk
A circular countryside route from Loggerheads crosses Ashley Heath, follows Mucklestone Wood Lane and drops into Ashley before crossing the A53.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- from Loggerheads through Ashley Heath to Ashley
- Access
- Use current route information and take care at the A53 crossing described in the research.
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Three ways to explore Ashley
Signature outings
Monuments beyond its scale
Step inside St John the Baptist for the Gerard and Kinnersley chapels, where alabaster and marble memorials fill a compact village church.
A route into Ashley
Walk from Loggerheads across Ashley Heath and along Mucklestone Wood Lane before the route drops into Ashley.
Ashley’s long-lived pub
Make time for the stone-built Peel Arms, with its rear restaurant, cask ales and large beer garden.
The village story
Ashley Village Guide
A source-locked story of Ashley's pub, church monuments, deep history, countryside route and community hall.
A two-century village pub
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.
Practicalities around the Peel Arms
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.
A church built for monuments
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.
Marble chapels and Domesday roots
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.
Paths and village life
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.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
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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:St. John The Baptist Church, Ashley - geograph.org.uk - 6832877.jpg — photograph by Brian Deegan; St. John The Baptist Church, Ashley by Brian Deegan. 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.
- Church of St John the Baptist — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Peel Arms — camra.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Ashley Memorial Hall — ashleymemorialhall.com operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Ashley Heath and Mucklestone Wood Lane walk — ramblers.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Blore Heath Battlefield — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access