Bobbington

Runway dining and village hospitality

Amelia's Bar & Restaurant occupies the first floor of the old control tower at Wolverhampton Halfpenny Green Airport, on the edge of the village; you can eat breakfast at a window table while light aircraft take off and land below. It opened in the tower in May 2024, and reviews are mixed — good on taste and presentation, patchy on service — but it's open to anyone, not just pilots. Dogs are welcome outside, where cask ale goes on at weekends alongside Enville Ale.

The village pub, the Red Lion Inn, was first recorded as an alehouse in 1820 and has been run by the Shaw family for more than twenty-five years. It began as a coaching inn, stabling travellers' horses while they ate and slept; it now has sixteen bedrooms, a pool table and dartboard, and a beer garden with a children's play area. The kitchen runs from bangers and mash and fish and chips to Cornish hake, pork belly and chicken curry, with a lunch menu under £10 and two- or three-course options around £14 — or two 8oz sirloin steaks with all the trimmings and a bottle of wine for £25. On tap: Hobsons Town Crier, Enville Ale, Wye Valley HPA.

Wine, crafts and wildlife next door

There's no village shop, post office or butcher in Bobbington itself. Next door is Halfpenny Green Wine Estate — thirty acres of vines, a winery, a restaurant, tearooms and a craft centre with more than fifteen independent businesses. Its own white wine, Black Country Gold, has been tasted on site by the Prince of Wales.

The same estate is home to WILD Zoological Park, five themed zones — Reptiles Unleashed, Wild Australia, Amazon, Asia, Africa — with crocodiles, kookaburras, wallabies, otters, meerkats and big cats, plus daily demonstrations.

A circuit through heath and history

The Bobbington, Six Ashes and Highgate Common circular walk starts in the village, crosses farmland with views into Shropshire, passes the Red Lion, then loops back through Highgate Common's three hundred acres of woodland and heath. The long version is eight miles and about four hours; the short one four and a half miles. Refreshments come from the Red Lion, the pub at Six Ashes, and Six Ashes Tea Shop. Some bridges are in poor repair and the paths get wet after rain.

Holy Cross Church has a twelfth-century four-bay Norman arcade, and until the Reformation it was a dependent chapel of Claverley, over the Shropshire border, only becoming its own parish in 1726. It's Grade II* listed. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, later gave it a memorial wrought-iron flower stand, after her son Prince William of Gloucester was killed near the airfield in 1972.

Royal visits and rural connections

Henry III came through three times — 1238, 1245 and 1256 — and on each occasion four pipes of wine were ordered in ahead of him.

There's no confirmed mainline station nearby; the A458 passes about two miles east near Enville, with the 125 bus running Stourbridge to Bridgnorth. Wolverhampton is around nine miles off, Bridgnorth about eight and a half.

The school the airfield displaced

In 1792, sisters Hannah and Mary Corbett founded a school in the village for twenty poor boys and twelve poor girls from the parish's poorest families. It became White Cross School, and stayed until 1957 — not because it failed, but because the airfield next door had grown too close.