High Offley

The Pub That Faces the Canal

The Anchor Inn's front door faces the canal, not the road. That tells you most of what you need to know about High Offley before you've had a drink in it.

Go in and turn right, into the room with the quarry-tile floor, the two high-back settles, the window bench and the scrubbed tables, and you're standing in one of a small number of pub interiors in the country rated Three Stars on CAMRA's National Inventory of historic pub interiors — essentially unaltered since the 1960s. There are no bar pumps in here. The beer, Wadworth 6X, comes up from the cellar in jugs, the way it always has.

Food is sandwiches and toasties, nothing more. Dogs are welcome. The garden runs down to the canal, where the pub owns the fishing rights — a daily charge for visitors, free if you're camping or caravanning on site, which has been a Caravan Club Certificated Location since 1969. A blogger who stopped by in 2009, writing as Captain Ahab's Watery Tales, said it felt "very much like drinking in someone's dining room."

Two Pubs, Two Histories

It was built around 1830 to serve boat crews on the Shropshire Union Canal, and the same family has run it since 1903. It lends its name to the bridge next door, Anchor Bridge. Opening hours have historically been restricted — evenings and weekend lunchtimes, cut back further over winter — so it's worth checking before you set off.

A mile away in Woodseaves, the Cock Inn started life as a farmhouse with a brewhouse bolted on in the 19th century and has been a free house since 2012. Two open fires, a home-cooked menu served in the bar, the dining room or the patio, a darts board, and a dominoes team that plays out of the place along with Woodseaves FC.

Provisions and the Towpath

High Offley itself has no shop. Woodseaves has a One Stop and a post office that doubles as a general store. For anything more, Eccleshall is three miles off — a Georgian high street of independent shops and butchers, the ruins of a bishop's castle, and a farmers' market on the fourth Saturday of the month.

The best walk starts at Norbury Junction, about three miles off along the towpath, past Bridge 39, with the embankments opening out to views of the Berwyn Hills and the Wrekin before the path drops into wooded cuttings. Norbury Junction has boat hire, the Junction Inn, and the Old Wharf Tearoom, and hosts a canal festival every May Bank Holiday.

Roof Beams, Bells and Domesday

St Mary's stands on the hill above it all, Grade I listed, with a Norman north wall from around 1200 and a nave roof of late-medieval carpentry carved with heads and foliage. One of its four bells is dated 1601 and inscribed "God Save the church, our Queen and Realm / And send us peace in Christ."

Domesday valued the whole place at two pounds a year, nine households, held by Robert of Stafford.

Arriving and a Literary Afterlife

The village sits off the A519, three miles from Eccleshall and around eleven from Stafford, whose station now does the job the closer one at Norton Bridge stopped doing when it shut for passengers in 2017.

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd borrowed the real name High Offley for "The Meaning of Liff," inventing a definition for it that has nothing to do with the place itself. The village carries on regardless, unbothered by having been turned into a joke in a book it's never read.