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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
