Brewood

Coaching Inns and Village Tables

The Swan Hotel's car park is reached through a coach archway, and the low-beamed listed building is probably 15th century. The Goode family have run it for 43 years, with two snugs hung with old prints of the district, an inglenook fireplace and a skittle alley upstairs. It was South Staffs Pub of the Year from 2023 to 2025, and pours three permanent real ales — Wye Valley HPA, Three Tuns XXX and Burton Bridge Stairway to Heaven — plus rotating guests that tend to be Bathams, Enville Simpkiss or Holden's. The pub is dog friendly and has a patio garden at the back.

The Bridge Inn sits on Bridge 14 of the Shropshire Union Canal with mooring points and a car park for passing boaters. The Staffordshire Grill occupies the Lion Hotel, a Grade II listed building, with grill dishes and cocktails.

Provisions and the Canal Edge

For provisions there's a Spar and Lazy Days Café on the local food scene.

The Shropshire Union Canal runs along the western edge of the village, on a stretch Thomas Telford built between 1826 and 1835, not living to see it open. An Inland Waterways Association walk begins at The Swan Hotel car park, follows the Staffordshire Way towards Chillington Hall and returns to Brewood along the canal towpath from bridge 10. The published route is about four and three-quarter miles.

The Parish Church and Its Lost Font

St Mary and St Chad's is the oldest building in the parish — a chancel from around 1220, a tower added two centuries later — and Grade I listed. Four alabaster Giffard tombs line the chancel. The font has a stranger story: it disappeared during restoration work in the 1820s and turned up decades later, built into a rockery in a garden in the next village, before it was reinstalled in 1927.

From Domesday to the Royal Escape

The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Breude, worth ten pounds to its lord before the Conquest and five pounds after. In 1651, Charles II hid nearby at Boscobel House after Worcester, sheltered by the Catholic Giffard family, who still live at Chillington Hall, about 1.9 miles from Brewood in a straight line — a house built by Francis Smith and remodelled by Soane, with parkland laid out by Capability Brown.

Reaching Brewood

Penkridge has the nearest station, the A449 threads through for the M6 and M54, and the 876 bus runs to Stafford and Wolverhampton.