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.
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 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.
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.
