Once a year, a teddy bear bungee-jumps off the tower of St James' Church. It's the centrepiece of the Barton Teddy Festival, which grew out of the village's Open Gardens fundraiser in the early 1990s and is now marking its twenty-first anniversary. The rest of the two-day Family Festival is calmer — teddy rides, arts and crafts, a scarecrow competition — run by more than a hundred volunteers.
Barton has seven pubs for a village of just over four thousand people, which by any current standard is a lot of pubs.
The Middle Bell on Main Street runs two food offers under one roof: an informal Italian menu upstairs, "upper end" pub food downstairs. Stone-baked pizzas and gnocchi one flight up; fish and chips and roast beef below, in a building whose oldest part dates to the late 1700s and has been Grade II listed since 1984. Wye Valley HPA and Butty Bach are the regulars on the bar, with Draught Bass, Holden's Golden Glow and Marston's Pedigree rotating through.
The Royal Oak on The Green has been run by Katy and Steve Boulter since 2006 and has the trophy cabinet to prove it: local CAMRA Pub of the Year three years running from 2011, and Marston's national Cask Ale Pub of the Year in 2013, 2014 and 2016. Marston's Pedigree stays put; two rotating casks, usually from Dancing Duck, Marston's or Titanic, come and go.
Ron and Alex Mercer bought the old Red Lion in September 2023 and reopened it the following May as the Two Pigs. The brothers run Packington Free Range, a free-range pork, egg and chicken farm, and much of what reaches the plate traces straight back to it. Chef-patron Liam Dillon, who also runs The Boat in Lichfield, calls it "a neighbourhood pub focusing on modern pub classics with a twist" — Sunday roast, weekend breakfast, monthly tasting menus.
The Three Horseshoes on Station Road carries a TripAdvisor review titled, without qualification, "The Perfect Pub in Barton Under Needwood." The Shoulder of Mutton, a 17th-century former coaching inn, keeps low beams and an inglenook fireplace and lets rooms above.
At Barton Marina, the Butcher, Baker farm shop — full name "The Butcher, The Baker, The Ice Cream Maker" — sells meat butchered from Packington Farm alongside bread from Hindleys and other local bakeries, run daily by Steven and Tracey McKendrick, who farm at nearby Rangemore.
The marina holds more than 300 narrowboats and gives onto an easy loop round the basin, lakes and woodland paths, the towpath continuing on to Burton upon Trent past Branston Water Park's kingfishers. The village sits a mile off the A38 between Burton and Lichfield, with Burton's station six miles off and the 12, 12A and 12E buses stopping opposite the marina.
St James' Church, Grade II* and begun in 1517, was built by Dr John Taylor, later Henry VIII's ambassador to France, on or near the site of the cottage where he was born, one of triplet sons to a Forest of Needwood game warden. A restoration finished in December 2024 gave the tower's ring of eight bells two new trebles and a new frame.
The Domesday survey recorded the village as Bertune, worth £6 in 1066 and £7 twenty years on, with a mill that brought in six shillings a year. An old local rhyme, the Ballad of Barton, once named four village pubs; of those four, only the Royal Oak still trades under its original name.
