Croxton

Old Roads, New Rhythms

Croxton Country Stores sells airguns, ammunition and black powder guns from a building that used to be the village shop and petrol station. Duncan and Cathy Lawton run it now, from Pear Tree House on the B5026, and the business has stayed in the same family for over a hundred years — it just used to sell bread and petrol rather than clothing and shooting accessories.

There's no pub in Croxton itself. The building that would have filled that gap, the Swan with Two Necks coaching inn, is long gone; a well nearby still carries the name of Samuel Boughey, who ran the bakery there. For an actual drink you go to Eccleshall, three or four miles east, or Loggerheads, a few miles west on the Shropshire border, itself named after its own pub. Norton Bridge station closed to passengers in 2017; the nearest trains now run from Stafford or Stone.

Garden Walls and Lancet Light

A few minutes down the B5026 is Sugnall Walled Garden, a kitchen garden rebuilt from around a quarter of a million red Staffordshire bricks after Lord Glenorchy set brickmakers to work there in 1737. It runs a tearoom on garden produce, Easter to late September, Wednesday to Sunday, and hosts plant fairs and a farmers' market alongside it.

St Paul's church dates from 1854, a plain Victorian build rather than anything medieval. Three lancet windows depict St Stephen, St Paul and St John, and the organ, by Hill & Son of London, went in in 1873. Every couple of years it hosts the poetry and music concert that closes the well dressing festival.

Dressed Wells and Woodland Paths

The festival is the thing to time a visit around. Four wells around the village are dressed in the Peak District style — natural materials pressed into clay-lined boards — and linked by a signed trail: Boughey's Well, the Slopping Well, the Cattery Well, and one that has never acquired anything more poetic than "Well No. 3." It runs in June, clear of Eccleshall's own festival the month after. The 2025 event marked eighty years since VE Day, with wells dressed for the Women's Land Army and the Swynnerton munitions workers — locally, "the Swynnerton Roses." It costs over a thousand pounds a year to stage.

Walking starts easily from Sugnall's car park. The 6.5-mile Heritage Trail passes the restored Walk Mill Pool and Jackson's Coppice, a boardwalk through flooded alder woodland that fills with bluebells in spring and colour in autumn.

Sandstone Heights and Older Names

Above the village, Langot Lane has sandstone outcrops with old hand-quarrying marks and small caves — one supposedly home to a hermit in the 1910s, its mouth now strung with wire and a padlocked door. The ground drops from there toward the River Sow, with the Wrekin visible on a clear day. A local blog described the valley below as a place where "the hills shield out the motorway noise."

Croxton turns up in the Domesday survey as Crochestone, in the hundred of Pirehill: ten households, three ploughlands, worth one pound a year to the Bishop of Chester. Four roads still meet at the village centre, on what was once the London to Chester coaching road. The windmill on Windmill Lane is Grade II listed and long since converted into a house.

A Village Kept in Common

The play area sits on the old school playing field, kept deliberately to wood rather than bright plastic, next to Millennium Wood, which the parish planted and still checks on every year as it matures. Every festival it fills with stalls and a barbecue. Liz and David Hemingway took over running the well dressing in 2025, from Ros and Ken Langford, who had done it for six festivals before them.