Hints

Fruit Fields and the Strawberry Cabin

Twelve acres of pick-your-own fields run alongside Watling Street at Manor Farm Fruits, worked by the Clarke family for three generations and open to the public since 1973. Strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants ripen here from mid-May to early September, and the farm's own tagline — Farm Fresh Fun Since 1971 — undersells how much goes on: a maize maze, a nature trail, a flower field, an Easter Trail, a Berry Fest, a Pumpkin Fest, and a Santa's Grotto that rebrands itself Santa Paws, when dogs are allowed on site. They aren't allowed during ordinary picking season.

Next door, run independently, is the Strawberry Cabin, doing all-day breakfast, artisan sandwiches, homemade cakes and an afternoon tea, plus what one description calls the best range of vegan meals in the Tamworth and Lichfield area. It is, officially, Hints's number one restaurant on Tripadvisor — a title made easier by being the only restaurant in Hints.

A Review and the Missing Pub

Reviews are not uniformly glowing. "Won't be rushing back. So sad," wrote one visitor — worth recording honestly.

There is no pub in the village. The nearest is the Tame Otter, a short drive along Hints Road in Hopwas.

Landscape, Travel and Watling Street

The village is laid out along a single street, School Lane, hemmed by hedges and walls that open now and then onto long views across open country. A council conservation appraisal once described the effect as a "feeling of spaciousness." Hints sits on the slope between Watling Street and the Black Brook, a tributary of the Tame. Lichfield Trent Valley and Tamworth stations sit roughly equidistant, five and three miles off; nothing stops in the village itself.

Watling Street is the reason the village has this name at all: "Hints" comes from the Welsh hynt, a road, suggesting British speech survived here into the late sixth century. The same road explains why, in 1792, labourers digging on Hints Common turned up a Roman lead ingot weighing about 150lb, stamped with the mark of lead mines in north-east Wales and inscribed with a precise date. Cast, the Latin reads, "while the Emperor Vespasian was consul for the seventh time, and Titus, imperator, consul for the fifth time" — AD 76, imperial property that came off a wagon on this same road.

The Church and Vanished Hints

St Bartholomew's is the third church on its site, built in 1883 to a design by John Oldrid Scott and paid for by James Chadwick of Hints Hall, a cotton merchant who also funded the vicarage and endowed Hints as its own parish. It ran on gas until 1948; the cropped supply pipe still surfaces beside the lych-gate. Nearby stands a tumulus Robert Plot, writing in 1686, already guessed was Roman.

Hints Hall itself is gone, sold at auction in 1949 and demolished soon after, replaced by a house one account calls "singularly unimpressive." Its best-known resident was Sir John Floyer, who championed cold-water bathing and invented an early watch for timing a pulse. Briefer still was Hints Zoo, a bungalow on Hints Lane that operated from 1954 to 1962 before simply closing.

Canwell Show Day

Canwell, merged into the parish in 1934, still runs the Canwell Show — by the parish council's own description, one of the largest and oldest agricultural shows in the Midlands, and the thing most likely to fill the lanes for a day.