The well on Gratton Lane gets dressed every spring bank holiday: a picture built from flower and plant petals pressed into wet clay, outlined first in bark, twigs and berries, set inside a wooden frame propped over the water. Endon has done this since 1845, when a local shoemaker decorated a new well head over what's known as Sinner's Well to mark Oak Apple Day. It's still the biggest weekend on the calendar - a Well Dressing Queen crowned, a maypole, a funfair, a duck race - and the reason Wikipedia calls it "one of only a few outside Derbyshire which practises the ancient custom of Well dressing."
That's the festival. The rest of the year, Endon runs on the Black Horse.
It's rated the best of the village's three restaurants on Tripadvisor - 4.3 stars from 571 reviews - and does homemade pies, steaks and roasts, with vegan and gluten-free options if you need them. There's a beer garden, dogs are welcome, and Timothy Taylor Landlord is on permanently alongside a changing guest ale. Quiz night is Sunday; live music turns up on Saturdays most months.
The Plough Inn, an 18th-century Grade II listed building on the main Leek road, is now a Toby Carvery - all-you-can-eat, a children's menu, a pint of Peroni at £6.25. Reviews are warmer about the food than about the roast-potato supply on quiet afternoons.
For groceries there's a Co-op on Leek Road with its own bakery and café, open 7am to 10pm, and a post office at number 30 that covers half the surrounding parishes - Stanley, Brown Edge, Bagnall, Stockton Brook and more. Endon doesn't have a butcher or a farm shop of its own; you'd drive out for those.
Walking starts at the door. The Caldon Canal's Leek Branch runs straight through the village, giving flat towpath walking in either direction, and Deep Hayes Country Park - woodland and meadow on the site of an old industrial works, with bird hides - sits between Endon and Leek. For something longer, the Endon Bank and Knypersley Reservoir circuit runs 7.8 miles and takes the best part of four hours.
The village sits on Endon Bank, a hill that likely gave it its name - "dun" is Old English for hill - and the land climbs from around 480 feet by the main road to 900 feet in the northwest. St Luke's Church, rebuilt in the 1870s around a surviving 17th-century tower, has a Morris & Co. east window from 1893 and a Minton encaustic tile floor worth putting your head round the door for.
Domesday recorded Endon as "Enedun," King's land, and valued it at nothing at all - no villagers listed, no plough teams, entered simply as waste.
Stoke-on-Trent is the nearest mainline station; Endon's own closed to passengers in 1960. The A53 runs through on its way from Stoke to Leek, and the number 18 bus covers the same route from Hanley.
The poet T. E. Hulme, credited as the father of Imagism, was born at Gratton Hall in 1883 and killed in the war in 1917. There's a blue plaque for him now, a short walk from the well that still gets dressed every spring, in flowers, by people who never met him.
