Enville

Honeyed ale and the village pub

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 Enville Brewery's tap house, serving four regular ales alongside three changing beers and homemade pub food. It is independently owned, welcomes dogs outside, has open fires in winter, and a courtyard and garden.

The Sheepwalks are a popular walking area near Enville, close to Kinver Edge, with wide views over the surrounding countryside.

A small village with a wide horizon

The Staffordshire Way passes near Enville before reaching the sandstone ridge at Kinver Edge.

The nearest heritage stations are the Severn Valley Railway's stops at Hampton Loade, about 5.1 miles from Enville, and Highley, about 5.4 miles from Enville, measured in a straight line; road journeys are longer. For mainline trains, Stourbridge Town is linked by shuttle to Stourbridge Junction.

Enville is a small village on the A458 between Stourbridge and Bridgnorth, with Kinver as the nearest larger village.

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.

Domesday’s Efnefeld

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.