Biddulph Moor

A pub built for moorland weather

Tractors and horses turn up often enough in the Rose & Crown's car park that nobody remarks on it. It's a moorland pub, stone-built at the turn of the last century, with a quarry-tiled front bar and a log burner in the lounge. It sits on New Street and belongs to Joule's Brewery of Market Drayton, so the pumps run Joule's Pale Ale, Slumbering Monk, Pure Blonde and a craft lager called Green Monkey, plus a rotating seasonal ale.

Past menu highlights include homemade pies, stone-baked Italian pizza advertised as exclusive to the pub, and a Sunday lunch praised as amazing value for money. Dogs are welcome, and the Beer Shed out back provides an outdoor drinking space.

The other local and the missing shop

The other pub, the Foxhound on Hot Lane, is a free house that reopened in 2016 after a refurbishment split it into three areas around a central log burner. It serves home-cooked food made with local produce, with Bass, London Pride and Beartown Brewery beers across three hand pumps.

There's no working shop in Biddulph Moor now. Older accounts mention a post office, two further shops and a pharmacy, none traceable today.

High ground and headwaters

Biddulph Moor sits on a gritstone hilltop over 300 metres up. On a clear day, views stretch across the Staffordshire and Cheshire plains to the Welsh mountains, Jodrell Bank and the Wrekin.

A shorter outing follows the fingerposted public footpath off Barrage Road and crosses a stile into the field containing Trent Head Well, one of the springs at the source of the River Trent. For a river 185 miles long, the Trent has an incredibly modest start.

A village hall and an older claim

Biddulph Moor Village Hall stands beside the children's play park on Hot Lane and hosts wedding receptions, birthday parties, social groups and fetes.

The village's other claim is older and stranger. Local historian John Sleigh wrote in 1862 that a Crusader lord of Biddulph had brought back a "Paynim" — a Saracen — from the Holy Land and made him bailiff of his estate, and that the moor's families descend from his marriage to an Englishwoman. The Bailey surname is common here, and locals were once nicknamed the Pinkies, the Bluies and the Cabbages. There's no Domesday entry for Biddulph Moor itself; the parent manor was recorded as waste, meaning it paid no tax at all.

A photograph in a pub taproom

The Saracen story is unproven but survives in local memory. A circa-1965 photograph taken in a pub taproom shows Dick Gent, locally rumoured to have descended from the Saracen settlers, keeping the nine-hundred-year-old tale alive.