Colwich

Pubs on the Edge of the Chase

The Wolseley Arms at Wolseley Bridge keeps a water barrel by the front door for dogs, with treats and a bowl brought over unasked. Inside there are open fires and original features that survive because nobody got round to ripping them out. The kitchen does line-caught cod in beer batter with triple-cooked chips, mushy peas and samphire tartare sauce, a Wagyu burger, and Hunter's Chicken glazed with ginger beer bacon, alongside slow-cooked pies and stone-baked pizzas. The patio beer garden gets blankets handed out when it turns cold.

You're on the edge of Cannock Chase here, with the Trent & Mersey Canal a short walk away and Shugborough Estate close enough to reach on foot.

The Red Lion at Little Haywood is simpler — rolls at £2.50 (the cheese and onion, made vegan, gets singled out in reviews more than most) and bar snacks until 8pm running to pork pies, scotch eggs and sausage rolls. Dogs and muddy boots are welcome in the bar all year round.

Cask Ales and Canalside Provisions

The Clifford Arms in Great Haywood pours three regular and three rotating cask ales and holds a Cask Marque accreditation for it. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "the only pub in the village," which undersells it slightly — the building started as the gatehouse to the Anson estates and was operating as a pub by 1818.

For provisions there's the Canalside Farm Shop & Cafe at Great Haywood, family-run, right on the towpath, with a deli, butcher, bakery and homewares counters plus a seasonal plant centre. Open nine to five, every day.

Following the Water

The walking mostly follows water. The Staffordshire Way links up with a circular route around Shugborough Park, crossing a railway bridge, passing the hall and Essex Bridge — a 16th-century packhorse crossing with parapets low enough to remind you it predates cars — before reaching Tixall Lock and its lock cottage. The Trent & Mersey towpath runs along the park's northern edge to the junction where it meets the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal, a spot walkers rate for kingfishers as much as the view.

The Wolseley Centre, on what used to be Wolseley Hall's grounds, is free to visit: 26 acres of woodland, lakes and marsh with paths built for pushchairs and wheelchairs, a Kingfisher Cafe over the swan lake, and duck feeding for anyone under about ten.

Arrival and Old Parish Stone

Rugeley Trent Valley station is the nearest working one, about four miles off — Colwich had its own station until 1958. The village sits off the A51, three miles from Rugeley and seven from Stafford, with local buses running between the two.

St Michael and All Angels has a tower dated 1640 and an alabaster monument to Sir Robert Wolseley, who died in 1646. Beneath the organ loft is the Anson family vault, which took in the 5th Earl of Lichfield's coffin in 2005.

Abbey Journeys and a German Twin

St Mary's Abbey has housed Benedictine nuns since 1836, a community founded in Cambrai in 1623 and jailed during the French Revolution before eventually settling here. In 2024, a traditionalist order from Missouri took over — their first house in Europe.

Colwich has been twinned with Rimbach in Hesse, Germany, for more than thirty years — long enough that nobody currently involved remembers whose idea it was.