Farewell

The Fair Well and Its Twin Hamlet

A clear spring still rises near the church at Farewell, and it is where the village gets its name — Old English fæger wielle, the fair or clear well. There's no sign on it, no bench, just the fact that it's still flowing. It fed a mill from the 12th century until the 1940s; old maps show a pond there into the late 1960s.

Farewell itself has no shop and no pub. It shares a parish with Chorley, a hamlet less than a mile off, and that's where you'll find the food and most of the parking.

A Pub Stop and the Pilgrim Road

The Malt Shovel, on Lower Lane in Chorley, is a family-run pub with an open-fire bar on one side and a refurbished restaurant on the other. Dan and Terri run it now, and reviewers say the food's better for it. King prawns in Marie Rose sauce with a fresh bread roll is £9, whole baked camembert with caramelised onion marmalade and garlic ciabatta is £9, and a pan-roasted chicken breast with Parmentier potatoes and romesco sauce runs to £18. There's a weekday fixed-price menu and a Sunday roast. Dogs are welcome, there's a beer garden and a field beyond it with a children's play area, and enough cyclists and walkers stop by that booking ahead helps.

The walking is Cross in Hand Lane, which sounds modern and isn't — it was the main Lichfield-to-Stafford road until 1770, and before that a pilgrim route, named for travellers carrying a wooden cross toward St Chad's shrine at Lichfield Cathedral. The Lichfield Lore blog describes it as a series of holloways that "cosy up with the wildflowers while you wait for a car or three to squeeze past." Sunk between sandstone banks in places, hedged elsewhere, it makes a five-mile loop of about four hours, passing The Nelson at Cresswell Green roughly halfway round.

What Survived at Farewell

Farewell and Chorley Village Hall, on Shute Hill, hosts the parish council and little else.

The church, St Bartholomew's, is Grade II* and older than it looks from the road. The nave and tower were rebuilt in brick in 1745, but the chancel is the original chapel of Farewell Priory, with 15th-century tracery windows and two ranges of misericords carved around 1300. During the 1747 rebuild, workmen found rows of earthenware jars plastered into the south wall, openings facing inward — acoustic jars, probably. Most broke on removal. One survived and ended up in a Lichfield museum.

From Priory to Cathedral Country

The priory was founded around 1129 by Roger de Clinton, Bishop of Lichfield, first as a hermitage and then, in the old account, it "soon became a nunnery" — a small Benedictine house, never rich, with sixteen prioresses recorded between 1248 and 1527. A 1331 visitation found nuns leaving without permission and sleeping where they shouldn't. The priory closed in 1527, fallout from Cardinal Wolsey's fundraising for his Oxford college; the last prioress, Elizabeth Kylshawe, and her four remaining nuns were dispersed within a month. The buildings were gone by the 18th century. Only the church stayed.

Lichfield is three or four miles off, with its three-spired cathedral, and Cannock Chase rises to the west. Lichfield Trent Valley is the nearest station.

The Sound That Remains

On a quiet evening the loudest thing in Farewell is still the spring, doing what it's done since before the nuns arrived.