Village stories by the upper Trent
Hixon
A small Staffordshire village with a lone historic pub, a George Gilbert Scott church and easy links to family attractions at Amerton.
- Best for
- Low-key heritage and family stops
- Give it
- A half day, or longer with a nearby estate
- Don't miss
- Pasturefields Bridge No. 77
Photo: Liz Taylor · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A compact village with unusually varied stories
Hixon works best as a quiet village visit paired with the canal edge or nearby Amerton.
The Bank House and St Peter's give the village two strong historic anchors, while the Millennium Green adds an easy family pause. Pasturefields Bridge extends the visit to the Trent and Mersey Canal, and Amerton Farm, Amerton Railway or Shugborough can turn it into a broader day out.
Your picks, your pace
Make Hixon yours
Choose a mood or build your own list. Your saved stops are an ordering aid, with a direct map route when you are ready.
Local signatures
3 placesHixon Millennium Green
A village-centre green with play equipment for young children and a large grass area for informal games and picnics.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- village centre
Amerton Farm
A working farm with cows, pigs, ponies and chickens, plus indoor and outdoor Playbarn space for children.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours 30 minutes
- Locality
- Amerton
Shugborough Estate
A nearby National Trust estate with house and parkland, a walled garden, working Park Farm and riverside monuments.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 3 hours
- Locality
- Shugborough
Food & drink
1 place
The Bank House
Hixon's only operating pub occupies a Grade II-listed building with a 17th-century timber-framed core, retained beams, log burners and a courtyard pizza oven.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour 30 minutes
- Locality
- Hixon village
History & heritage
3 placesSt Peter's Church
The Grade II-listed Gothic Revival church was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and has a north tower with a broach spire; Wilmot Martin is buried in its churchyard.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- Hixon village
Pasturefields Bridge No. 77
A late-18th-century, Grade II-listed humped-back accommodation bridge carrying a path over the Trent and Mersey Canal.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- edge of Hixon parish
Amerton Railway
A narrow-gauge railway at Amerton that can be paired with the neighbouring farm park.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour
- Locality
- Amerton
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On the map
Hixon at a glance
Tap a marker to jump to its guide card.
Three ways to explore Hixon
Signature outings
The pub that endured
The Bank House grew from a centuries-old farm and parlour pub into Hixon's only surviving pub.
Scott's village church
St Peter's brings Sir George Gilbert Scott's Gothic Revival work and a broach spire to the centre of Hixon's story.
A bridge from the 1700s
Pasturefields Bridge carries a path over the Trent and Mersey Canal in one humped, segmental span.
The village story
Hixon Village Guide
Ten original paragraphs trace Hixon from its surviving pub and parish church to its canal, rail history and community life.
The Bank House
The Bank House has outlived four other pubs in Hixon, almost inevitable given how it started. It began life as a farm about 400 years ago, brewing its own beer on the side, before giving up farming for good and becoming the village pub full time. Grade II listed, it's a 17th-century timber frame extended in brick a hundred years later, refurbished in 2017 with the original beams, log burners and low-ceilinged nooks kept. There's a courtyard with a wood-fired pizza oven, pizzas from about £9.
The rest of the menu runs from a smoked salmon Scotch egg with tartare sauce to a chorizo hash with fried egg, both £5.95, a weekly pie — usually minced beef — at £12.50, and a chicken Caesar salad at £11.50, with a cranberry and almond Bakewell tart or a chocolate truffle torte. Reckon on £25 a head; full vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free menus run alongside the regular one.
A dog welcome and lost pubs
Bring a dog and it gets a mat, a bowl of water and a jar of treats at the table. One reviewer, there for her wife's birthday, wrote that "what a lovely touch to have a mat, treats and a bowl of water at the side of the table for the dog."
Hixon had five pubs at one point. The Green Man went last, sold to a developer in 2019 and demolished in 2020 for a Co-op and housing, despite a petition and parish council objections.
St Peter's and Domesday Hixon
St Peter's Church went up between 1845 and 1848, designed by George Gilbert Scott on land given by Lord Talbot, once the site of a windmill. It has a north tower with a broach spire, and in the churchyard lies Wilmot Martin, a farmer and charity fundraiser who performed as "The Staffordshire Harry Lauder."
Domesday recorded the village as Hustedone: five households, two plough teams, a meadow, valued at ten shillings and ninepence.
Paths, play and the rail disaster
A footpath runs out to Amerton, close enough to fold in a visit to the farm park and its Playbarn. Closer to home, Hixon Millennium Green has a play area and room for a proper game, there's a cricket ground on Church Lane, and the Wellington Fields Allotments Association runs a set of plots. A humpbacked, separately listed 18th-century bridge on the parish edge carries a footpath over the Trent and Mersey Canal.
Nationally, Hixon is known for 6 January 1968, when a low-loader carrying a 120-ton transformer was caught on the new level crossing at New Road by the Manchester–Euston express doing around 75mph. The crossing was thirty feet long, not long enough for the load to clear in time, and eleven people died. The inquiry that followed was the first judicial rail inquiry since the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and it changed how abnormal loads are handled at crossings. The crossing was replaced by a bridge in 2002.
Getting here and giving back
The A518 and A51 run through, Stafford is under eight miles off, and a Chaserider bus makes five stops in the village between Stafford and Uttoxeter. The nearest station is Rugeley Trent Valley — Hixon's own halt closed to passengers in 1947.
Every year the Charity for Hixon Elderly Folk puts on a music festival on the Millennium Green, and what it raises pays for the village's older residents to have a Christmas do.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Staffordshire, linked directly to their property pages.
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Greenways House - Parking, Pool Table and Garden!
- Sleeps 10
- 4 bedrooms
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Lee House Cottage + Annexe
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Leek
Silkwood House | Boutique 4 Bed nr. Peak District
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Stoke-on-Trent
Heather's House
- Sleeps 6
- 2 bedrooms
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Spring View of Bank House pub, Hixon, Staffordshire - geograph.org.uk - 2003574.jpg — photograph by Liz Taylor; Spring View of Bank House pub, Hixon, Staffordshire by Liz Taylor. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Bank House — thebankhousehixon.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St Peter's Church — achurchnearyou.com national body or asset manager
- Hixon Millennium Green — hixon.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Pasturefields Bridge No. 77 — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Amerton Farm — amertonfarm.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Amerton Railway — amertonrailway.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Shugborough Estate — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager