Elford

Cellars, Ale and the Village Pub

The Crown Inn's dining room used to be a cell. Upstairs, the pub's function rooms once served as a courthouse, and anyone found guilty there was walked down to the vaulted brick space below to wait out their sentence. It's called the Old Cellar now, and you can order dinner in it.

The Crown is the only pub left in Elford — brick-built, mainly 18th century, with a Victorian bar-back and period panelling, listed as a pub interior of special national historic interest. There's a pool table, table football, a dartboard and a real fire. Draught Bass is the standing order at the bar, alongside two changing guest beers; briefly, in the late 2010s, the pub brewed its own on a one-barrel kit called Crown Brewhouse.

Outside there's a beer garden with a converted horsebox pouring cocktails, and dogs welcome throughout. One Tripadvisor review is headlined, simply, "Best pub in the constituency." It's on The Square, open from 4pm on weekday afternoons and from noon at weekends.

Garden Walls and Tame-side Paths

There are no shops in Elford — no butcher, no post office, no bakery. What there is instead is the Walled Garden, a twelve-foot enclosure that once fed Elford Hall's kitchens, left to go wild for fifty years after the Hall itself was demolished, and rebuilt from 2009 by volunteers under David Watton, later awarded a British Empire Medal for it.

Sophie, Countess of Wessex, opened it officially in 2011. It's free, open daily until dusk, with a rose garden, a boules court, a boat house on the River Tame, and a children's play area optimistically named the Giant Garden.

Footpaths follow the Tame out towards Harlaston, a mile and a half east, and up to Croxall Lakes, a restored wetland two miles north where the river has been allowed to braid and wander the way it used to.

Tombs, Legends and the Stanley Boy

St Peter's Church sits at the end of a tree-lined avenue, its tower dating to 1598, the body rebuilt in the 1840s and 1860s. Inside are alabaster tombs Pevsner rated among the finest in the county.

Sir Thomas Arderne and his wife Matilda lie holding hands in effigy. Sir John Stanley is carved in armour, an eagle by his head. In the Stanley Chapel is the monument known as the Stanley Boy: a figure in hard grit stone holding a tennis ball, his hand raised to his temple where it struck him.

The Latin on the plinth reads Ubi dolor ibi digitus — where the pain is, there is the finger. The story was first written down by the antiquarian Sampson Erdeswicke around 1600. It has no record to back it up, and later scholars think the carving is a century too early to be him at all.

Manor, Mills and Mercian Memory

The manor belonged to Ælfgar, Earl of Mercia, before it was forfeited to the Crown in 1066. Domesday records twenty-four villagers, eight smallholders and two mills working the Tame.

Robert Bage, the novelist, ran a paper mill here and wrote from the Mill House. Three of his six books were rated by Walter Scott among the fifty best of the age.

Rails, Roads and a Riverside Dusk

Elford's own railway station closed long ago. Tamworth and Lichfield, both about five miles off, cover the trains now, and the number 2 bus still comes through on its way to Harlaston.

Walk the riverside path at dusk and you'll likely meet someone from the Crown doing the same, dog on a lead, in no hurry.