The Cock Inn sits on top of Hanbury Hill, about 600 yards from a crater you could lose a house in. More on that later. It's the only pub in the village, and it earns the position — public bar, lounge, a separate snug, and a 60-seat restaurant, run as a free house since 1998.
The food is straightforward and properly done: cod and chips, steak and kidney pudding, burgers, pizza, a Sunday roast served as a trio of meats. Raspberry cheesecake and crumble and apple pie for afterwards. A two-course lunch comes in under £15, and burgers are 25% off on Tuesdays.
Dogs and horses are both welcome, with water bowls provided. There's a spacious beer garden, and three waymarked routes, the Hanbury Walks, all start from the door. On the bar you'll find Draught Bass and Marston's Pedigree alongside two rotating guest ales.
A blogger once wrote that the Cock Inn is "not far from the A50 but a totally different pace of life and a pub that hits the spot." That's about right.
A pub has stood on this site since at least 1839. The current building dates from around 1950, after the original was badly damaged by the RAF Fauld explosion in 1944. Local lore has it that the brewery's rebuilding plans for Hanbury got swapped with plans meant for a Birmingham housing estate — so what's standing on the hill now was drawn for somewhere else entirely.
Of the three Hanbury Walks, one heads to Tutbury Castle through old RAF land, one goes to Draycott in the Clay past the church, and a shorter loop climbs into the eastern hills. The village stands on a headland 250 feet above the Dove Valley, looking north to the Weaver Hills and the Derbyshire Dales.
St Werburgh's Church is Grade II* listed, mostly 13th-century work over a 12th-century core, with two Anglo-Saxon crosses built into the west wall by the south door. It began as a nunnery, founded in 680 AD by Ethelred, King of Mercia, for his sister St Werburgh, who was buried here before the Danes destroyed the place in 875. Inside are alabaster monuments to the Adderley and Egerton families, and the effigy of Sir John de Hanbury, buried in 1303 with a dog at his feet; the manor itself was held for centuries by the Vernon family.
The crater is the other thing. On 27 November 1944, at 11:11am, 3,500 to 4,000 tonnes of explosive went off at the underground RAF Fauld munitions depot in the parish — one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, reportedly heard 30 miles away in Coventry. It destroyed a reservoir holding 450,000 cubic metres of water and a farm below it, killing an estimated 70 people. A secret wartime inquiry blamed a technician who used the wrong tool to remove a live detonator. The crater survives: 100 feet deep, up to 1,007 feet across.
There's no shop in the village, but the Post Office operates out of St Werburgh's Church itself. St Werburgh's School, a Church of England primary built in 1848, is still teaching, and Draycott and Hanbury Cricket Club has played on Knightsfield Road since 1979. Sudbury station once served the village; today it's Burton-on-Trent or Uttoxeter, both a short drive, with the Bus Link 412 running to Burton.
The Thatches, a 15th-century building near the church, used to be a pub called the Fighting Cock. Its old cockfighting ground is now the back lawn of the vicarage next door, mown and unremarkable.
