Haughton

Farm-made ice cream and village dining

Red Lion Farm's ice cream travels about a hundred yards from cow to spoon. The dairy farm on the edge of Haughton makes it on site from its own herd of Jerseys, more than a hundred flavours across the year from a recipe handed down for three decades. There's a coffee and cake shop attached, an Owl Experience, pygmy goats in something called Rascal Ranch, alpacas and chickens, plus a brick-built parlour that opened in late 2017.

Newport Road is where most of the village's life happens. A small shopping centre holds a post office, general store and newsagents alongside a butcher, a fish and chip shop and a hairdresser. Further along sits the Bell Inn, a converted farmhouse with a front bar for snacks and an L-shaped restaurant behind serving locally sourced food: a fixed price lunch menu, a Thursday steak night, Sunday roasts, and reviewers mention sea bass, lamb shank, cod and chips. Dogs are welcome in the bar, with their own menu, and the beer garden is landscaped rather than just mown. Five real ales are kept, including Timothy Taylor Landlord and Wainwright Gold, and the pub holds a five-out-of-five Cask Marque rating.

A pub in transition and St Giles's medieval fabric

The Shropshire Inn, further along the A518, has held an AA Rosette every year since 2015, on dishes like brie, mushroom and cranberry wellington, home-cured salmon and a 16oz gammon steak. One reviewer called its Thursday steak night "the best steak night [I've] attended in a long while." At the time of writing the restaurant is closed, citing family illness, staffing and rising costs, and running as a drinks-only bar, with private functions still catered. Worth a call before you go.

St Giles Church, which gave the Bell Inn its name, is mostly late 15th and 16th century, Grade II*, with a west tower and north chapel dating to the rectorship of Nicholas Gravinor, who held the post from 1489 to 1520. John Loughborough Pearson restored it in 1887, keeping the Tudor-Gothic nave but rebuilding the chancel in Early English style. Historic England's listing praises "the extent and quality of its medieval fabric," particularly the tower.

Domesday Haughton and Moat Farm House

The Domesday surveyors recorded the village as Halstone, in the hundred of Cuttlestone, worth thirty shillings a year to Robert of Stafford, who held it through a man named Urfer. Fourteen households are listed: six villagers, seven smallholders and one slave. Moat Farm House, still standing, carries a carved wooden panel over its door reading "Thomas Reynolds 1680," and traces of an actual moat survive along two of its boundaries.

Railway traces and the Way for the Millennium

Haughton's own railway station opened in 1849 and closed to passengers almost exactly a century later, in 1949. The old line is now part of the Way for the Millennium, a long-distance path running through on its way between Newport and Stafford, which is itself about four miles east along the A518, with buses in between.

Playing fields and village life

There's a primary school, a football pitch and play area at Jim Jarvis Memorial Playing Field, and Haughton Village Hall, with its own kitchen, stage and WiFi, hosting the Women's Institute and a Garden Guild among others. The village won Staffordshire's Best Kept Village award five years running, from 2011 to 2015, and is known locally for its Christmas lights, with a donation box out each December for charity.