Essex Bridge crosses the River Trent in fourteen low stone arches, which sounds unremarkable until you learn it once had something closer to forty-three. It was built for the Earl of Essex, a favourite of Elizabeth I, and was already old enough to need repair by 1583. A 1679 account describes it being rebuilt in stone after an earlier wooden bridge collapsed. What survives today — Grade I listed, fourteen arches, low enough that a laden packhorse could cross without ducking — is reckoned the longest surviving packhorse bridge in England. It carries no traffic now. You walk it, slowly, with Shugborough Hall visible across the water meadows on the far bank.
The village sits where the Trent meets its tributary the Sow, on the northern edge of the Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is also where two canals meet: James Brindley's Trent & Mersey, finished through here in the 1770s, joins the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal at Haywood Junction, a few hundred yards from the bridge. Arrive on foot along the towpath and you get moored narrowboats stacked three and four deep at the junction itself, then thin out fast the further you walk. Andy Tidy, who writes as the "Canal Curator," has described the pattern well: "sometimes you pass through mile after mile of nothingness with hardly a boat in sight, and then suddenly you arrive at a canal intersection to find it absolutely rammed with moored craft."
The Clifford Arms, on Main Road, is the pub to know. It started as a gatehouse to the Anson family's Shugborough estate, became a pub by 1818, and was rebuilt by Bass in 1930, so what you're drinking in now is largely a 1930s room with older bones and a wall of photographs of the pub through the decades. The menu runs from sandwiches, baguettes and jacket potatoes up through a Ploughman's Lunch, Red Chilli & Ginger Chicken Goujons, something called the Clifford Crunchie, and steaks and grills, with vegetarian and gluten-free options alongside. The thing people actually talk about is the hot beef sandwich — thick white bloomer, garlic butter, a serious quantity of beef. "Best beef sandwiches I have ever had," runs one Tripadvisor review, which for a pub sandwich is a high bar to clear. Three permanent cask ales — Adnams Ghost Ship, Draught Bass, Wainwright Gold — plus three rotating guests, and the place is Cask Marque accredited. There's a log fire for cold days, a beer garden, dogs welcome in both, and a quiz team, a dominoes team and a classic car and bike club that treat it as a base. Children are welcome until 8pm, and the restaurant runs 6-9pm daily plus lunchtimes at weekends. It has been a stopping point for boaters, walkers and cyclists off the Trent & Mersey for the better part of two centuries, which is a long time for anywhere to hold a reputation, let alone keep it.
The village's other licensed venue is the Sports & Social Club, also on Main Road, in a building the 2nd Earl of Lichfield originally put up as a Working Men's Reading Room and Library — some accounts trace that use back to 1869, though the club in its current form is closer to forty-five years old. Non-members can sign in at reception. There's darts, dominoes, cribbage, snooker, pool, sports-league teams, and Saturday nights given over to karaoke, a disco or live music, with Doom Bar and a changing guest beer at the bar. It is not trying to be the Clifford Arms, and doesn't need to be.
For food beyond the pubs, Canalside Farm sits directly on the Trent & Mersey towpath by the junction — a working farm shop with its own deli, butcher, bakery and homewares, open seven days, 9am to 5pm. The farm is known regionally for its strawberries and other soft fruit, supplied to catering and retail businesses across Staffordshire, and in summer you can pick your own strawberries, raspberries and blackberries, with pumpkins in the autumn. The cafe seats seventy-two inside and forty on a canal-view terrace, does all-day breakfasts, seasonal lunches and a traditional afternoon tea, and sources what it can from the farm itself or from suppliers within thirty miles. It has picked up awards for it. There's a post office too, on Main Road, doing the ordinary business a village post office does.
There are two churches, and they tell different stories. St Stephen's, the parish church, dates from 1840, designed by the local architect Thomas Trubshaw for the 2nd Earl of Lichfield and largely rebuilt in 1858. Its corbels and bosses were carved by Samuel Peploe Wood, a sculptor born in the village in 1827, and the churchyard holds the graves of three Earls of Lichfield and other members of the Anson family from Shugborough. The Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist has a stranger history: built in 1827-9 as the private chapel of Tixall Hall for the Clifford family, it was dismantled when the family left Tixall in the 1840s and rebuilt, stone by stone, on its present site in Great Haywood — the reassembly marks are still visible inside. It was here, in May 1916, that J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith received a nuptial blessing.
Walking out from the village, the obvious route is the Tolkien Trail — a roughly 4.7-mile circular up into Cannock Chase and back, largely flat through the village and Shugborough Park before it climbs past Brocton Coppice and the Sherbrook Valley, with its stepping stones, and returns across Essex Bridge. Allow two to two and a half hours. Shorter and flatter is the Canal & River Trust's Great Haywood "Wellbeing Walk," a loop of similar length along both canal towpaths past the junction and the farm cafe. West along the Staffs & Worcester Canal you reach Tixall Wide, a stretch deliberately widened by the canal's builders to look like a lake, so as not to spoil the view from the now-vanished Tixall House — the surviving Tixall Gatehouse still stands beside it. And if you fancy stretching your legs further, Little Haywood is a short, level walk along the Trent, close enough that the two villages are often treated as one.
The Domesday survey of 1086 records Great and Little Haywood together: fifteen households — nine villagers, five smallholders and a priest — ten ploughlands, two leagues of woodland, six acres of meadow and a mill worth five shillings. The whole was valued at two pounds to the lord, the Bishop of Chester, in both 1066 and 1086, which tells you roughly how much this stretch of the Trent valley was worth to anyone before the canals arrived. The village had its own mill and brewery once; both are long gone, and survive only as local road names. A car accident here in 1905 was serious enough that the village mill pond was drained and the road through the centre straightened afterwards. A railway station finally opened in 1887, on the Stone-to-Colwich line, and closed in 1947 — by 1941 wartime cuts had already reduced it to a single train a day with no way back. The A51 bypass, opened in 1964, took the through-traffic out of the village for good.
The Ansons bought Shugborough in 1624 and held it for three centuries. When Thomas Anson inherited in 1720 he demolished the old estate village that stood in the way of his park and rehoused its people across the river, in new cottages in what became Great Haywood — which is to say the village you're standing in is, in part, the overspill of somebody else's landscaping decision.
Edith Tolkien moved here in the spring of 1916, with her cousin Jennie Grove, to be near her husband's army camp on Cannock Chase, and lived here until early 1917, most likely at what is now called Rock Cottage, near the old Reading Room. Tolkien himself came back to recuperate with her over the winter of 1916-17, invalided home with trench fever, at a cottage at Gipsy Green on the nearby Teddesley Park Estate, and it was there that he began writing what would become The Silmarillion. In his early mythology he turned the confluence of the Trent and the Sow at Essex Bridge into "Tavrobel," where two invented rivers meet, and Shugborough Hall is thought to be the model for the "House of a Hundred Chimneys" — it actually has around eighty, a discrepancy one Tolkien-trail blogger has called "prone to a little bit of hyperbole."
The land above the village, on the Shugborough estate, shows signs of old small-scale stone quarrying and is still known locally as "the cliffs," or sometimes "the caves" — the underlying rock is Triassic sandstone with glacial deposits on top. In August 2002 those cliffs briefly made the national press: adverts in The Guardian, The Stage, the London Review of Books and the Staffordshire Newsletter sought an "ornamental hermit" to live in a tent up there for a single weekend, as part of an art exhibition called "Solitude." Around 250 people applied. The job went to the artist Ansuman Biswas.
There used to be a third pub, the Staffordshire Knot — known earlier as the Tiger, under a licensee called Lewis Biddulph from around 1820 — which closed in the late 1960s. Its last landlady, Isabella "Bel" Arnott, ran it until the end and died in Congleton in 1989. The building is still there, now a private house, and still carries the name: The Knot.
Families tend to gravitate to the flat towpaths in both directions from the junction, easy going with a buggy or a bike, and to Canalside Farm's pick-your-own fields in season. The Sports & Social Club has its own list of amusements for a wet afternoon, and the Memorial Hall, a registered charity venue, hosts community events through the year, including an annual craft show. A couple of miles off, the Wolseley Centre — headquarters of the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, on the former grounds of Wolseley Hall — has twenty-six acres of woodland, lakes and marsh, free entry, a lakeside cafe and a learning hub, which is enough to fill a half-day without anyone getting bored.
Shugborough itself, across Essex Bridge and now run by the National Trust, is the obvious next stop: mansion house, museum, a walled kitchen garden and a working model farm, the ancestral seat of the Earls of Lichfield. Beyond it, Cannock Chase rises into heathland and forest, with waymarked walking and mountain-biking trails including the Monkey Trail. Rugeley is four and a half miles off, Stafford about seven, with its castle and old town centre. There's no working railway station in the village any more — the nearest are Rugeley Trent Valley and Stafford — but the Chaserider 828 bus runs between the two, via Great Haywood and Lichfield, and the A51 sits just outside the village, close to its junction with the A513 at Wolseley Bridge.
Stand on Essex Bridge at the end of the day and you get boats coming through the junction to moor for the night, the light going amber over the water meadows, and somewhere behind you in the village a pub filling up with people who walked here off the towpath and aren't in any hurry to leave.
