Staffordshire · Cannock Chase edge
Brocton
A timber-framed village where an old inn gives way to ancient oak woodland and the layered wartime landscape of Cannock Chase.
- Best for
- Chase walks and wartime history
- Give it
- A relaxed half day
- Don't miss
- Brocton Coppice's ancient oaks
Photo: Geoff Pick · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with the Chase on its doorstep
Come for the village, then follow woodland tracks into a landscape shaped by old oaks and First World War history.
Brocton works best as a village-and-Chase visit: begin with its church or one of its pubs, then make time for the coppice, military cemetery or Freda's poignant memorial.
Where to go
Places in Brocton
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesThe Seven Stars
A family-run country inn with original beamed and vaulted ceilings, rotating regional guest ales and a large outdoor terrace with football nets.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour 15 minutes
- Locality
- Brocton
Brocton Coppice
An ancient oak woodland walk on Cannock Chase, close to Sherbrook Valley's stream, birch and pine slopes.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour 15 minutes
- Locality
- Cannock Chase
- Access
- Use public tracks and follow current land-manager guidance.
Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery
A Grade II-listed cemetery for more than 5,000 German and Austrian war dead, with a Hall of Honour, Zeppelin Terrace and the Katyn Memorial on the site.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour
- Locality
- Cannock Chase, Brocton parish
- Access
- Visit respectfully and check the Official site for current access information.
Food & drink
1 placeThe Chetwynd Arms
A dog-friendly gastropub named for the former owners of the Brocton Hall estate, with a beer garden and children's play area.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour 15 minutes
- Locality
- Brocton
History & heritage
2 placesAll Saints Church
A plain brick church founded as a mission hall and schoolroom, opened in 1891 and dedicated as All Saints in 1951.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Brocton
- Access
- Check the Official site for services and visitor access.
Freda's Grave
The grave of Freda, the Harlequin Great Dane mascot of a New Zealand Rifle Brigade battalion, still visited beneath its renewed headstone.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Cannock Chase
- Access
- Treat the memorial respectfully.
Things to do
1 placeMilford Common
A popular Cannock Chase spot for picnics and ball games, with ample parking.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour
- Locality
- Cannock Chase
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Three ways to explore Brocton
Signature outings
Find Brocton's ancient oaks
Follow public tracks through Brocton Coppice, the ancient oak woodland on the Chase above the village.
Remember Freda
Seek out the grave of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade mascot whose memorial is still visited on the Chase.
Make room to play
Use Milford Common for an easy picnic or ball games, making an outdoor pause on Cannock Chase.
The village story
Brocton Village Guide
From timber frames and old inns to ancient woodland and the remembered lives of Cannock Chase.
Timber Frames and the Seven Stars
The A34 comes into Brocton, bends right at the village green, then curves left to run alongside it, past timber-framed houses on Park Lane, among the most beautiful in the county. The Seven Stars is a short walk on.
It's family-run, refurbished in 2018, and the BBC's 1986 Domesday Project recorded the building as "over 400 years old" — the beamed, vaulted ceilings are original. Order the slow-cooked lamb or the toffee apple crumble; there are gluten- and dairy-free options too, and guest ales rotate in from Three Tuns, Purity, Titanic and Salopian. There's a beer garden with football nets, dogs are welcome, and the pub is also home to a clay pigeon club and an Osprey watersports rescue team.
Food, Shopping and the A34
The Chetwynd Arms, further along, takes its name from the family who owned the Brocton Hall estate from the late 1600s until 1920–22. It's a Marston's two-for-one now: burgers with crispy chips, curries, Sunday roasts, sirloin steaks, mixed grill, white chocolate cheesecake. Google rates it 4.4, dogs are welcome throughout, there's a play area by the beer garden, and food is served all seven days.
Brocton itself runs to one shop. The post office at 5 Pool Lane opens weekdays, 10 till 4, and is shut at weekends. No butcher, bakery or deli trades in the village — for those you'd drive four miles into Stafford, or catch the number 74 bus between Stafford and Cannock.
All Saints and the Chase
All Saints Church, a plain brick building begun as a mission hall in 1891, wasn't consecrated under its present name until 1951.
Walking starts at the green. The Cannock Chase War Trail turns right off it, then immediately left and uphill past a quarry entrance, climbing along Coppice Hill into the old training-camp ground — trench lines, rifle-range earthworks and the trackbed of a light railway nicknamed "Tackeroo." Higher up, Sherbrook Valley has, in Christopher Somerville's words, "the stream chuckling quietly under its bridges and slopes of birch and pine closing off the valley from the outside world." Brocton Coppice, close by, is ancient oak woodland. Coming by train, the nearest working station is Rugeley Town, on the Chase Line to Birmingham, about 45 minutes across the Chase on foot; Stafford's mainline station is four miles by road.
From Domesday Waste to Wartime Memory
Domesday recorded the place as Broctone, "waste," under the Bishop of Chester. It didn't stay that way. Brocton and Rugeley Camp trained up to 40,000 men at once, roughly 500,000 over the First World War, including the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. Tolkien trained here through the winter of 1915–16, learning army signalling before the Somme, and married Edith Bratt that March while still stationed on the Chase. New Zealanders used German prisoner-of-war labour to build a scale model of the Messines battlefield for map-reading practice, too fragile to leave exposed once rediscovered — excavated and reburied in 2013.
The German Military Cemetery, opened in 1967, holds over 5,000 German and Austrian war dead, the largest concentration of German military graves in Britain, alongside the Katyn Memorial to the 1940 Polish massacre. Freda, a Great Dane and mascot of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade's 5th Battalion, died on the Chase around 1918. Brereton locals kept flowers on her grave for twenty years, and it still gets visitors, under a headstone renewed in 1964 and 2001.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Staffordshire, linked directly to their property pages.
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Track Through Brocton Coppice - geograph.org.uk - 2135016.jpg — photograph by Geoff Pick; Track Through Brocton Coppice by Geoff Pick. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Seven Stars — thesevenstarsbrocton.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Chetwynd Arms — chetwyndarmspub.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- All Saints Church — achurchnearyou.com national body or asset manager
- Brocton Coppice — staffordshire.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Freda's Grave — cannock-chase.co.uk other published source
- Milford Common — staffordshire.gov.uk statutory register or public authority