Blymhill

Village life and the wider parish

The Blymhill & Weston-Under-Lizard Village Hall stands next to St Mary's Church with a licensed bar, snooker tables and SKY Sports on for football, rugby, golf, F1 and tennis. It reopened in September 2011 after a rebuild, and now runs weekly darts and short mat bowling nights, dance and fitness classes, and a monthly film club.

There is no pub in Blymhill itself. Wrestlers Farm, on the edge of the village, was once the Wrestlers Inn, where wrestling matches and cock fights are said to have taken place; it's a farm now, and the fighting is over. The post office, established in 1862, closed on 29 August 2000. What's left for food, drink and diversion is a short drive away at Weston Park, the Capability Brown parkland that shares the same parish, which has a café, a restaurant, an art gallery, a miniature railway and an outdoor adventure playground across its 1,000 acres.

Footpaths and medieval stonework

Public footpaths cross the village and the surrounding parish, and South Staffordshire District Council rates it a popular spot for walkers. Two loops start close by: an easy 1.9-mile circuit to Boscobel House, where Charles II hid after the Battle of Worcester, taking in the ruins of White Ladies Priory; and a longer 8.1-mile route round Belvide Reservoir nature reserve via Wheaton Aston, Lapley and Stretton. The terrain throughout is historic parkland and farm track, mostly flat.

St Mary's Church has a mid-14th-century core, built during the incumbency of Stephen de Bromley, rector from 1349. An arched recess in the south chancel wall holds a weathered stone coffin thought to be his. The tower is Perpendicular Gothic, the chancel Decorated, the south aisle Early English, and George Edmund Street restored and extended the lot in 1858-59, adding the oak choir stalls, pews, pulpit and font still in use. A Victorian county directory recorded simply that the church "is ancient, and was repaired in 1859; it contains memorials to the Dickenson family." It's Grade I listed.

Manor history on the rise

Up on a rise above the village sits High Hall, a late-17th-century farmhouse of red brick with a dog-leg staircase and a steeply pitched tile roof, said to occupy the site of the residence of William Bagot, lord of Blymhill under Henry II. A county directory called it "seated on a beautiful eminence." The Domesday survey of 1086 recorded the manor at seven villagers, four smallholders and one slave, worth £1 a year to its lord, Warin of Malicorne, held before the Conquest jointly by five brothers.

A well on the border

Tradition also has St Chad preaching near Blymhill in the 7th century and consecrating a well a mile northwest towards the Shropshire border, at what's now Great Chatwell; it's that hamlet's name, not Blymhill's, that may derive from the well.

Connections and community rhythm

Shifnal, on the Wolverhampton-Shrewsbury line, is the nearest station, and Watling Street, now the A5, runs close by. Brewood, a market town with roots in Anglo-Saxon times, is six miles off. Most weeks, though, the darts players and short mat bowlers at the village hall are probably closer to the point of the place than any of that.