Hilton

The house behind the name

Hilton Park services, on the M6 between junctions 10a and 11, borrowed their name from a village most of the people who stop there have never seen. What the name actually belongs to is a red-brick Georgian house behind gates on Hilton Lane, Essington, set in twenty-five acres of gardens and parkland with a moat that's been half filled in since the 1830s. Henry Vernon rebuilt it in the early 1720s, possibly to a design by Richard Trubshaw, and a third storey went on around 1830 without disturbing the original pediment. These days it's an office and events centre, weddings included.

Hilton itself doesn't run to a pub, so the walk for one takes you into Essington, to the Minerva on Wolverhampton Road. It's a three-part house — a plain, sparsely furnished bar in the middle, a smaller games room to one side, a lounge with more comfortable seating to the other — with a patio out back and two hand-pulls that rotate through beers like Holden's Golden Glow and Robinsons Trooper. A reviewer signed only "Soup Dragon" called it "a deceptively large detached pub, with cream render and a small patio... always worth a visit." Live music on Saturdays, darts, dogs on leads welcome, children too until eight.

Two neighbouring locals

Shareshill, the other direction, has the Elms — an L-shaped bar, a separate lounge, a five-star Cask Marque rating, and Davenports on both handpulls, the Original Bitter at 4.2% and the Gold a shade lighter at 3.9%. Real fire, pool table, a garden big enough to matter, part of it covered.

Shareshill also has the shop. The village bought it outright in 2009 to stop it closing — the first community shop in Staffordshire, run entirely by volunteers, open every day of the week from seven in the morning. It shares the street with the parish church, St Mary and St Luke, a Grade II* building with a red-brick nave from 1742 and a tower two centuries older, and a double dedication that's rare enough to be worth mentioning. Inside are two alabaster effigies of Sir Humphrey Swynnerton and his wife Cassandra Giffard, the family who built the original manor house at Hilton before the Vernons got hold of it.

Seven households in Domesday

Domesday recorded Hilton as seven households — three villagers, a freeman, two smallholders and a slave — among the smaller entries in the whole survey, worth a shilling a year to its lord in 1066 and ten by 1086. The lord was the canons of St Mary's, Wolverhampton, and Hilton was a township of that parish rather than a place in its own right, which is roughly how it still reads on a map.

Hilton Green's reclaimed orchard

For a walk, Hilton Green in Shareshill is a reclaimed sewage works with an orchard of more than sixty fruit varieties, a wildflower meadow, and willow beds pollarded for basket-weaving. There's a yurt for when the weather turns.

Orchards, connections and nearby escapes

Landywood station is under two miles off, on the Chase Line; the 71 bus runs Wolverhampton to Cannock through Essington. Moseley Old Hall, where Charles II hid after Worcester before slipping off to France, is a short drive, and so is Cannock Chase. Locally it's said a Derby-winning racehorse was bred at Hilton Hall, and that John Wesley once stayed there. Nobody seems to have the paperwork, and nobody seems especially bothered.