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.

Wednesday to Friday is pie night. There's stone-baked Italian pizza, advertised as exclusive to the pub, and a Sunday lunch reviewers have called amazing value for money. Dogs are welcome. Out the back is the Beer Shed, built new in recent years for drinking in the open moorland air.

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. The food is home-cooked, using local produce, and the beer runs to Bass, London Pride and Beartown Brewery across three hand pumps. One TripAdvisor review titled itself, simply, "a Gem of a Pub."

There's no working shop in Biddulph Moor now. Older accounts mention a post office, two further shops and a pharmacy, none traceable today. The nearest farm shop with a butcher's counter is Glebe Farm on Peel Lane in Astbury, about four miles off.

High ground and headwaters

What the village has instead is height. It sits on a gritstone hilltop over 300 metres up; on a clear day the view runs across the Staffordshire and Cheshire plains to the Welsh mountains, taking in Jodrell Bank and the Wrekin. A circular walk links Rudyard Lake, the ridge of Biddulph Moor and the village of Rushton Spencer, six to ten miles depending on the route.

A shorter walk, from a footpath off Trentley Drive, takes you to the source of the River Trent — a scatter of springs on the moor's edge, including one called Trent Head Well. For a river 185 miles long, the Trent has an incredibly modest start. Congleton station is about four miles away; Stoke-on-Trent is ten by road.

A village hall and an older claim

Biddulph Moor Village Hall, next to the children's play park on Hot Lane, hosts wedding receptions, fetes and an open-air summer music festival called Rock on the Rocks.

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.

The story on the pub wall

A local historian who writes as The Local Mythstorian, Eli Lewis-Lycett, has looked at the evidence and concluded: "It's entirely possible that those 'Saracens' did indeed make their home on the moor." A photograph from around 1965, taken at the Foxhound, shows a man called Dick Gent, locally rumoured to be one of their descendants — which is how a nine-hundred-year-old story ends up as a caption on a pub wall.