Canals, pubs and village history
Coven
A Staffordshire village where canal towpaths, parish green space and a Victorian church sit close to long-standing places to eat and drink.
- Best for
- Canal walks, pub stops and low-key local history
- Give it
- A relaxed Coven visit, with Moseley Old Hall nearby
- Don't miss
- Cross Green Bridge and its canal towpath
Photo: John Lord · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A village day shaped by water, green space and good stops
Coven rewards a relaxed pace, with practical local food stops, two contrasting outdoor spaces and history that reaches from a Victorian church to Charles II’s escape.
Coven is strongest as an unhurried local day: collect provisions at Aston’s, take in St Paul’s or the parish green spaces, then follow the canal at Cross Green to a pub stop. Moseley Old Hall adds a substantial nearby history visit.
Where to go
Places in Coven
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesThe Anchor Inn
A canal-side dining pub rebuilt after a fire in the 1960s, with rustic beams, open fires, garden seating and a menu that includes steaks, fish cakes and Sunday roasts.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Cross Green, on the edge of Coven
The Bront
A quiet, roughly nine-acre parish-owned open space and wildlife area with the River Penk running through it.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- off Poplars Farm Way
Coven Park
A family play stop with an aerial runway, a large tree house and the spinner locally described as the Witches Hat.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- School Lane
Food & drink
2 placesThe Harrows Inn
A contemporary country pub and free house with home-made food, changing real ales and a large beer garden with covered booths and a children’s play area.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- A449, outside the village centre
Aston's Of Coven
A village butcher founded in the 1930s and now in its third family ownership, with meat from the counter and vegetables from the attached veg barn.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- Coven village
Walks & outdoors
1 placeCross Green Bridge and Canal Towpath
A towpath stop on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, centred on the Grade II-listed Cross Green Bridge, numbered 71.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Cross Green and Coven Heath
History & heritage
2 places
St Paul’s Church
A Grade II church built in 1857 to Edward Banks’s design, with a cruciform plan, sandstone walls and a south-west tower topped by a spirelet.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 40 minutes
- Locality
- Coven village
Moseley Old Hall
The Elizabethan and Jacobean house where Thomas and Alice Whitgreave and the priest John Huddleston sheltered Charles II after the Battle of Worcester.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 150 minutes
- Locality
- Near Coven
- Access
- Check the National Trust site before travel.
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Three ways to explore Coven
Signature outings
Canal Time at Cross Green
Start beside listed Bridge 71 and give the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal a quiet stretch of your day.
Edward Banks’s 1857 Church
Look for St Paul’s south-west tower and spirelet in Edward Banks’s compact cruciform design.
Charles II at Moseley Old Hall
Visit the nearby house where the Whitgreaves and John Huddleston sheltered Charles II after Worcester.
The village story
Coven Village Guide
Pubs, towpaths, green spaces and several centuries of Staffordshire history, told in the original Travel Fox article.
The Fox Above the Bar
Above the bar at the Anchor Inn hangs a stuffed fox wearing a medallion engraved with an anchor. It explains the pub's old name in one glance: Fox for the hunting country round Coven, Anchor for the canal at Cross Green.
The building only dates to the 1960s — the original burned down — but it was rebuilt with rustic beams and exposed floorboards to look older, and mostly gets away with it.
Blogger Andy Tidy, who calls it his local, wrote that "if you can gauge a pub's welcome by the size of its logpile, the Fox and Anchor is welcoming indeed."
Three Places to Eat and Drink
The menu runs to 8oz rump and 9oz sirloin steaks, hand-made fish cakes, lamb shank with dauphinoise mash, and a stone-baked Korean pulled beef pizza alongside the Sunday roasts. There's canal-side decking for summer, open fires and a weekly quiz for winter.
The Rainbow, on Brewood Road, is a different proposition: one open-plan room with a sectioned-off pool table and a patio garden, no kitchen of its own, though a burger van sets up outside. Three changing real ales sit alongside the permanent Greene King Abbot.
Out on the A449, the Harrows Inn was refurbished in 2020 into a contemporary free house with a five-star kitchen and a beer garden seating around 160 under covered booths. It won Wolverhampton CAMRA's Country Pub of the Year before changing hands in 2023.
Butcher, Towpaths and the Bront
For food to take home, Aston's has been the village butcher since the 1930s, founded by a Mr Simms and now three families deep in ownership. There's a veg barn attached, and customers come from Brewood and Penkridge too.
Both canals here are walkable from the door. The Shropshire Union runs through the parish past a string of listed bridges; the Staffordshire and Worcestershire skirts the village at Cross Green, where the towpath continues on to Penkridge, eight miles away.
The Bront, a nine-acre patch of parish land off Poplars Farm Way, has the River Penk running through it and is quieter than either canal.
Getting Here and Layers of Village History
The 876 bus runs the same line north, Wolverhampton to Stafford in about thirty-six minutes, Monday to Saturday; drivers use the A449. Coven's station closed in the 1950s — the nearest now are Penkridge and Codsall.
St Paul's only went up in 1857 — before that Coven was just a chapelry of Brewood, without a church of its own. Its architect, Edward Banks of Wolverhampton, gave it a south-west tower with a spirelet, a nave 62ft by 24.5ft, and a gallery that once seated 396.
Older still is the Homage on Brewood Road, a colour-washed brick house dated 1679, among the oldest brick-built houses in Staffordshire, its pediments and round-headed panels intact behind what are now two separate front doors.
From Domesday to the Witches Hat
Coven turns up in the Domesday Book as "Cove," worth 16 shillings a year and held by Robert of Stafford, with eight households recorded — small by 1086 standards.
In 1651, Charles II came through Coven Heath on the run from his defeat at Worcester, on his way to Moseley Old Hall a few minutes up the road, where Thomas and Alice Whitgreave and the priest John Huddleston sheltered him.
Coven Park, on School Lane, has an aerial runway, a large tree house, and a spinner known as the Witches Hat.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Staffordshire, linked directly to their property pages.
Cheddleton
Greenways House - Parking, Pool Table and Garden!
- Sleeps 10
- 4 bedrooms
Cheddleton
Lee House Cottage + Annexe
- Sleeps 19
- 8 bedrooms
Leek
Silkwood House | Boutique 4 Bed nr. Peak District
- Sleeps 8
- 4 bedrooms
Stoke-on-Trent
Heather's House
- Sleeps 6
- 2 bedrooms
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:St Paul's Church, Coven - geograph.org.uk - 1805148.jpg — photograph by John Lord; John Lord. 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 Anchor Inn — camra.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Harrows Inn — punchpubs.com other published source
- Aston's Of Coven — ratings.food.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- St Paul’s Church — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Cross Green Bridge and Canal Towpath — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Bront — brewoodandcoven-pc.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Coven Park — brewoodandcoven-pc.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Moseley Old Hall — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager