Enville

Honeyed ale and the pub at the trailhead

Enville Ale carries a bee on its label, and it's not decoration. The recipe is a nineteenth-century "beekeeper's ale," passed down from the founder's great-great aunt when Enville Brewery started in 1993 in a set of unused stables on a farm in the village — natural well water, floor-malted Maris Otter barley, and honey. The brewery still uses traditional steam equipment on the Grade II-listed farm complex, with a reed-and-willow bed handling the effluent.

The Cat Inn on Bridgnorth Road is the tap house for it: four regular ales alongside three changing ones, LocAle included, and a menu running to steak and Enville ale pie, fish and chips, and a hot pork and stuffing bap with chips. One TripAdvisor reviewer titled their review "The spiritual home of Enville Ale."

The pub is independently owned, dog-friendly outside, keeps open fires through winter, and has a courtyard and garden for the rest of the year. Its car park is also where most people start the walk up onto the Sheepwalks — a 5.7-mile loop past Enville Hall, following part of the Staffordshire Way.

A small village with a wide horizon

It earns its name: sweeping views over the Black Country and Kinver Edge, and on a clear day you can pick out the Malverns and the Cotswold escarpment. Reckon on two and a half hours, moderate going.

The village is small, around a hundred houses strung along the A458 between Stourbridge and Bridgnorth. There's a post office doubling as a general store, which sells euros and National Express coach tickets — a fair sign this isn't a place with its own railway station.

The nearest stations are the Severn Valley Railway's heritage stops at Hampton Loade and Highley, both about five miles off, or Stourbridge Town for the mainline.

Norman stone and hidden misericords

St Mary's Church sits at the centre of it, a Norman nave from around 1100 with a chancel added by Roger de Birmingham between 1272 and 1307, and a tower rebuilt in 1871 by George Gilbert Scott. Pevsner logged it in his Buildings of England survey, and Nick Owen got married here in 2020.

Inside are four fifteenth-century misericords, carved wooden ledges you have to lift the seats to see, one showing two dogs attacking a muzzled bear while a man controls its chain and another watches from a tree.

The landscape park behind the road

Enville Hall, just up from the church, has belonged to the Earls of Stamford since the late fifteenth century, when a Leicestershire branch of the Grey family — the same family that built Bradgate Park — married into the manor. From 1750 the 4th Earl laid out a landscape park with the architect Sanderson Miller and the poet William Shenstone, and by the 1770s it was ranked alongside Hagley and Shenstone's own Leasowes as one of the gardens tourists were expected to see.

The park held a private racecourse once; it's a forestry track now.

From Efnefeld to the cricket ground

The Domesday surveyors called the place Efnefeld — "level open land" — and valued the whole of it, seven households and four ploughs, at one pound three shillings.

Enville Cricket Club has played inside the Hall's grounds since 1821, formed to mark the coronation of George IV: four Saturday sides, Sunday teams, and a women's section, on a ground regulars call one of the best small grounds in the country. On a summer evening, that's still where most of the village is.