Hoar Cross

Farmhouse Food and a Second Life

Sam's Bar at the Meynell Ingram Arms has its own pizza oven, running noon to ten daily. The main kitchen does homemade pies and steaks alongside it, with children's, gluten-free and vegan menus, and breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings from half eight to eleven. The building started life as a farmhouse in the early sixteenth century and was known for years as the Shoulder of Mutton, before the Meynell Ingram family gave it their name around 1860.

It closed for a long stretch and reopened after a full refurbishment in May 2019, now run by the RedCat Pub Company. Three real ales sit on the bar as standard — Draught Bass, Marston's Pedigree, St Austell's Cornish Best — plus a rotating guest. The beer garden is a block-paved courtyard with covered pods and picnic tables front and side, with two EV chargers in the car park. Dogs get treats on arrival and a corner by the fire; the pub reckons they're not just allowed but adored.

Maker Lane and a Parish of 250

A short drive out at Maker Lane, The Deer Park opened as a farm shop and café in August 2020. Its butcher, Russell's at The Deer Park, does locally sourced meat and pies; the Linhay Restaurant handles breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea. There's a dog-friendly ancient woodland trail on site, alpacas to feed, and a field where you might spot deer.

The parish counted 250 people at the last census, which is worth knowing before you go looking for a high street.

Angels in Sandstone and Gold

What dominates the place instead is the Church of the Holy Angels, Grade I, pink sandstone, with a central crossing tower visible from most of the surrounding fields. Emily Meynell Ingram commissioned it after her husband Hugo died in a hunting accident in 1871, the same year their new hall was finished, and built it without regard to cost. Bodley, the architect, put it more plainly than any guidebook has managed since: "Oh, that one had more opportunities as was granted at Hoar Cross."

Inside, a deliberately plain nave gives way to a chancel carved and gilded without restraint — a reredos crowded with angels and archangels, a painted font canopy from the 1890s, and Stations of the Cross copied from St Paul's Cathedral, Antwerp, and covered in gold leaf. The organ contains pipework built in 1779 for Bangor Cathedral. The church opens daily, ten to five, and welcomes walkers, cyclists and dogs off the surrounding paths.

The Hall, the Paths and the Way In

Hoar Cross Hall itself, half a mile off, is Elizabethan in style, its two turrets topped with weathervanes shaped as an M and an I for the family that built it. It stopped being a family seat in 1953 and has been a spa since 1989, now one of the largest in Europe.

The Hoar Cross Circular runs four miles from the church along the National Forest Way and back; a longer route heads for Yoxall past a watermill and through the woods at Hawk Hills. The nearest station is Burton upon Trent, nine miles off; a Diamond Bus runs from there, but not often.

Antlers Next Door

Abbots Bromley, a few minutes away, still runs its Horn Dance every September with antlers carbon-dated to the eleventh century. Nobody in Hoar Cross seems especially bothered by that. They have their own church to look after.