The Tame Otter has been pouring drinks on this spot since the early nineteenth century, back when it was called the Chequers Inn. It sits on the Coventry Canal on the road into Lichfield, the original building at the Hints Road junction now joined to a rear extension of bare brick, flagstone floors and dark beams across several levels.
Three handpumps carry Doom Bar, Purity Mad Goose, Everard's Tiger and Rev James, depending on the week. Dogs are welcome in the bar, water bowls provided, and the lawned beer garden climbs toward the canal without quite reaching it.
The Red Lion is the other option, on Lichfield Road at the edge of Hopwas Woods. It does cottage pies, curries and Sunday roasts from locally sourced ingredients, in a food-oriented lounge with its own solid fuel stove — the smaller bar next door has one too.
Food runs 10am to 9pm most days, 6pm on Sundays, and the bar stays open until midnight on Saturdays. Two regular cask ales: St Austell Tribute and Timothy Taylor Landlord.
The garden is the bigger draw: a sprawling lawn, a paved terrace, a play area for children, and mooring for anyone arriving by boat. Dogs are allowed in the bar and garden, not the dining lounge. There's an old take-out hatch by the entrance, its stained-glass surround unused for years.
Both pubs sit at either end of the Hopwas Woods–Hademore circular walk, about 9.4km along the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal through Hopwas Wood and the Whittington firing range, back along the towpath. Allow two and a half hours.
A shorter route follows the towpath to Whittington, which has somewhere to eat. The wood covers 385 acres and has been continuously wooded since at least the eleventh century, though part of it is an active military range — check gov.uk for firing times before letting a dog off the lead.
St Chad's Church, above the village, went up in 1881: red brick with timber framing in the upper stages, an octagonal spirelet crowning the central tower. Nikolaus Pevsner called it "certainly an ingenious and entertaining building."
It replaced the earlier Hopwas Chapel, pulled down in the 1880s for being too small and inconvenient. The chapel's old graveyard is still there, said locally to be haunted by the ghost of a small boy.
The Domesday Book recorded the place as Opewas, a royal manor: eleven villeins and two bordars, five plough teams, a mill worth thirteen shillings and fourpence, the whole manor valued at forty shillings before and after the Conquest.
Higher in the wood stood the Woodhouse, a forester's lodge built in 1730 for the Fisherwick estate. Unconfirmed local tradition has it sheltering royalists during the siege of Lichfield and stabling Cromwell's horses. It stood until 2010. Folklore along the same lanes remembers a footpad called Knox, said to have preyed on travellers heading into the wood.
Tamworth station is about two miles off, a fifty-minute walk, and the A51 runs between Tamworth and Lichfield. Arriva's 765 and X65 buses stop at Church Drive.
The census counted 1,016 people here in 2011. One of them is the horror novelist Guy N. Smith, who has been writing from the village for years, not far from the canal where the boats still tie up for the night.
