Chapel Chorlton

The old road and scattered parish

At Stableford, on the edge of the parish, the A51 does a small dog-leg where the old Lichfield to Chester road once turned, and a cast iron milepost still stands there giving distances to Pipegate, Woore, Nantwich and Stone. The route was mapped in John Ogilby's Britannia of 1675, one of the first road atlases of England and Wales.

Chapel Chorlton itself sits north-west of Stone, up on slightly higher ground, in undulating farming country. The parish is really three places — Chapel Chorlton, Hill Chorlton and Stableford — scattered among fields, with Maer Hills and Hanchurch Woods rising to the south-east.

What the village has lost

There is no shop in the village. Hill Chorlton's Slaters Shopping and Craft Village, which once held fifteen independent businesses, burned down in November 2021, and the owners have applied to demolish what's left for housing rather than rebuild.

The pub situation is worth being straight about. The Former Cock Inn at Stableford, Grade II listed and dating from the late seventeenth century, stopped trading some years ago and is now a private house. Slaters Country Inn, a mile and a half away at Hill Chorlton, was the other option — beamed rooms, an open fire, a beer garden, homemade steak and kidney pie, beer-battered fish and mushy peas, a Sunday roast of beef or pork. It closed on 18 January 2026 after thirty-five years, a recent loss rather than a current recommendation.

Church stones and Domesday ground

What's left is St Lawrence's Church. The tower is medieval; the rest was pulled down and rebuilt in 1826–27, in Classical style, by James Trubshaw Junior of the Little Haywood dynasty of Staffordshire builder-architects, at a cost of £800. The churchyard holds two separately listed monuments of its own, the Delves Memorial of 1796 and an early-nineteenth-century sundial, and headstones running from 1751 to 2004 under family names — Hemmings, Turner, Randles, Cliff, Wain — that keep turning up generation after generation.

Domesday recorded the settlement as Cerletone, held by the Bishop of Chester, with a lord named Leofnoth. Seventeen ploughlands were surveyed but only one team was working the land, and the whole holding was valued at ten shillings, the same figure it had carried twenty years earlier, with part of it noted as waste.

Paths out to woods and estates

Footpaths cross the fields to Hill Chorlton, Maer, Whitmore and Standon, all under two miles off. Further out, Hanchurch Woods and Swynnerton Old Park give proper walking country, including a loop out to the Hanchurch Water Tower of about six and a half miles, or a shorter version at under four.

Eccleshall, six miles off, has a Georgian high street, independent shops, a monthly farmers' market and the ruins of Eccleshall Castle, once a palace of the Bishop of Lichfield. Whitmore, two miles away, has its own hall, open to visitors between March and September, with the Mainwaring Arms and a tearoom nearby. Trentham Gardens is about twenty minutes by car. There's no railway station in the village; Stafford and Stone are nearest, and buses stop at Maerfield Gate and Woodside.

Two brothers in the churchyard

In the churchyard, two brothers are remembered on the same memorial: Charles Henry Randles, a private in the 9th Royal Fusiliers, killed on Christmas Day 1915 at twenty, and George Harvey Randles, who served with the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers and died the following October, aged twenty-five. Their parents, Charles and Selina, are recorded alongside them, in a churchyard where the same handful of surnames have been quietly repeating themselves for two hundred years.