Kinver

Inns, borders and the old High Street

The White Harte on Kinver's High Street has been pouring pints since at least 1605, which is the earliest date anyone can pin on it with confidence, though locals will tell you it's older again and call it the oldest inn in the village centre. It sits at 111 High Street, Grade II listed, a seventeenth-century remodelling of something that may go back further still, with nineteenth-century alterations layered on top. There's a pool table, a dartboard, and dogs welcome throughout the whole building, not just the bar. The menu runs to light bites, pub classics and puddings, alongside draught lagers, craft beers, ciders, wine and cocktails, and reviewers describe the staff as attentive and the food reasonably priced. The car park gets a rougher press — enough reviewers mention a dispute over it that it counts as a running local grievance.

Kinver sits in the far southwest corner of Staffordshire, on the meandering River Stour, close enough to Shropshire, Worcestershire and the West Midlands that the village borders all three. A sandstone ridge, Kinver Edge, rises wooded and heathy above the rooftops, and the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal runs through the area below it. The High Street is a genuine mixture of periods rather than a themed one — timber-framed medieval and Tudor houses standing next to Georgian and Victorian fronts, some of the timber later hidden behind brick. The main beams in the building at 19–20 High Street were felled in 1562 or 1563. There's a late-sixteenth-century house at number 112. Fifty-four buildings in the village are listed, mostly houses, cottages and farm buildings.

A few doors along, the Manor House of Whittington occupies a genuinely old building — a sixteenth-century, Grade II*-listed former manor house with oak beams and stone archways throughout, built in 1310 by Sir William de Whittington for his family, who share a name with Dick Whittington but not, as far as anyone has established, any actual relation; the real Dick Whittington was from Gloucestershire. It became an inn in the eighteenth century and now does lunchtime classics, grill dishes and meat-free options, including a Hunter's Chicken and a Royal Chicken Tikka Masala, usually alongside one cask ale, typically Wainwright. Dogs are welcome in the bar and beer garden, and treats are kept behind the bar for anyone calling in on a walk. There's live music and a quiz night.

The pub is also said to be haunted, which for a building this age is close to compulsory. Lady Jane Grey is reported to have stayed there as a girl, before her nine-day reign and execution in 1554, and is said to sweep down the staircase into the bar before vanishing. Other reported ghosts include a monk hiding in a priest hole, a headless lady in the upper rooms, and — despite the absent family connection — Dick Whittington himself. Charles II is also said to have stayed at the inn after fleeing the Battle of Worcester in 1651, having crossed Whittington Heath to get there.

Beer, food and deep parish roots

There are three more pubs worth knowing about. The Vine Inn sits on the canal, with homemade pizzas and tapas, a carvery, and fresh fish, and a large beer garden looking out over the water; it opened in 1863 and has since been converted into a multi-level restaurant and pub. Six handpumps usually include two Kinver Brewery beers, Edge and Noble, two from Enville Brewery, and two guest ales, and dogs get a doggy box for a small charge. The Cross Inn, on Church Hill, is run by Black Country Ales and does weekend food — hot pork sandwiches, pork cobs, pies — with a log burner and a large outdoor area with benches; it has a 4.6 rating on Google. And the Plough & Harrow on the High Street, known locally as "Steps," is a Bathams tied house with two Bathams ales always on, walls covered in old advertising hoardings and breweriana, and a front bar popular with cyclists and walkers.

For food beyond the pubs, Kinver Deli occupies the site of Kays Butchers, which closed in 2016, and still sells some butchery alongside home-made produce, cheeses and olives. The High Street Bakery has a five-star food hygiene rating. And on Sandy Lane, Kinver Edge Farm Shop and Café grows its own leeks, onions, lettuce and potatoes, sells its own jams and honeys, and runs a ten-acre maize maze and pumpkin patch, open daily except Wednesdays.

St Peter's Church is mainly early fourteenth century, built around Norman fragments from an earlier church, with substantial extensions added in the mid-fifteenth century. It was restored in 1884–85 by George Gilbert Scott and his son John Oldrid Scott, who finished the job after his father's death, and the north aisle was rebuilt again in 1976 to a design by a local architect, John Greaves Smith. Inside there's a late-fourteenth-century font with elaborate tracery and a stained-glass lantern suspended above it. Local tradition holds that a Mercian king, Wulfhere, dedicated an earlier church on the site to his sons after their conversion to Christianity. The church is recorded as already standing at the time of Domesday.

Domesday itself records the village as Chenevare, worth five pounds to the lord in both 1086 and 1066 — the value hadn't moved in twenty years. It had seventeen villagers, seven smallholders, three slaves and a priest, sixteen ploughlands worked by eleven plough teams, and two mills valued together at a pound. Twenty-eight households in total, which put Kinver in the upper half of settlements recorded in the survey.

From Cynibre to the rock houses

The name is older than that. A charter of 736 records it as Cynibre, thought to combine a Celtic word for hound with a word for hill — probably a reference to Kinver Edge itself. The lord of the manor laid out the High Street as burgage plots for a planned new town in the late thirteenth century, and the village did well as a stop on the old Irish Road between Bristol and Chester. Woollen cloth was made here, coarse and fine, using fulling mills on the Stour, until trade moved on in the late 1600s.

What replaced it was iron. Richard Foley leased Hyde Mill in 1627 and turned it into a slitting mill, cutting iron bars into rods for the nail-makers of the Black Country. By the late eighteenth century Kinver had five slitting mills, reportedly more than any other parish in the country. The story attached to Foley — that he disguised himself as a wandering fiddler in Sweden to steal the secret of slitting-mill technology — was originally told about the Brindley family, who owned Hyde Mill before him, and got reattached to Foley somewhere along the way. The canal arrived in 1771, carrying timber, coal and bell-metal wares, and tying the local iron trade into the wider national network. During the Civil War, a cavalry skirmish took place on Kinver Heath between Royalist forces and a Parliamentary commander known, with admirable directness, as Tinker Fox.

But the thing Kinver is actually known for is up on the ridge. In 1617, the parish register recorded the burial of "Margaret of the fox earth" on the 8th of June — the earliest documented reference to anyone living in the rock dwellings at Kinver Edge, in what became known as Nanny's Cave, or locally as Meg-o'-Fox-Hole. She may have been a hermit, a reputed witch, or both; nothing else about her survives. The next record comes in 1777, when the writer Joseph Heely, caught in a storm, took shelter in the rock houses and found "a clean and decent family" living there, in homes he described as "warm in winter, cool in summer." By 1861 eleven families were recorded living in the caves at Holy Austin Rock. The last residents didn't leave until 1963, making these the last inhabited troglodyte cave dwellings in England — they finally moved out after 1950s council concerns about the lack of plumbing and sewage persuaded them to take council housing instead.

Long before that, the rock houses had already become a tourist draw. Around the turn of the twentieth century, residents served teas to visitors who came up to look; the café on site stayed open until 1967. In 1903 the artist Alfred Rushton painted Mr and Mrs Fletcher inside their rock home. The National Trust received 198 acres of the Edge in 1917, a gift in memory of Thomas Grosvenor Lee, a Birmingham solicitor born in Kinver, and now cares for close to 600 acres including the former Kingsford Country Park. Restoration of the rock houses began in 1993 and continued through 1996 and 1997, and they reopened to visitors in October that year. You can look round them today — kettle on the range, curtains at a window cut straight into sandstone — which makes the 1963 departure feel a lot more recent than it sounds.

Ridge walks and family detours

The ridge above the houses carries an Iron Age hillfort, thought to be late Bronze Age in its earliest phase, sitting close to what was once the boundary between two tribal territories — a line roughly followed today by the Staffordshire–Worcestershire county boundary.

For walking, the Staffordshire Way runs north from Kinver Edge to Enville, mostly on field paths with a short stretch of road, and can be muddy underfoot. The canal towpath heads south through Whittington, Cookley and Caunsall to Wolverley — flat walking, about ten miles there and back from the Vine to the Lock Inn at Wolverley, with shorter options if ten miles sounds like a lot. A shorter stroll along the same towpath reaches Whittington Lock, passing within 300 yards of the Whittington Inn. The National Trust has its own waymarked trail taking in the ridge, the hillfort and the rock houses, and further out, a 5.7-mile loop near Bobbington threads past Enville Hall and the Sheepwalks, with views back across to Kinver Edge.

Families are well looked after. The Kinver Sports and Community Association has football, cricket and a bowling club, plus a skate park, bike track, outdoor gym and children's play area, with plans in for a new sports centre and three more tennis courts at the local school. The Kinver Miniature Railway runs steam and diesel trains on a half-mile track a short drive away. A little further afield, the Severn Valley Railway runs heritage steam services through Worcestershire and Shropshire from Kidderminster, about fifteen minutes by car, and the Bratch Locks near Wombourne, another canal design from 1772, have two bridges, a toll house and a lock keeper's cottage worth the detour.

Beer, buses and life in the rock

Kinver Brewery, founded in 2004, won the Champion Beer of Britain gold medal in 2014 for a beer called Over the Edge — the same brewery whose Edge and Noble turn up on the handpumps at the Vine. The village has produced a reasonable spread of well-known names for its size: the actress and theatre director Nancy Price, born Lilian Nancy Bache Price; the Wimbledon champion Dorothy Round, who won the singles title in 1934 and 1937; the former Wolves forward Roy Swinbourne; and Robert Plant, who lives nearby. Locally there's talk of the Beast of Kinver, possibly an escaped lynx reported since the 1960s, and a Witch's Tree at the foot of the Edge.

The nearest station is Stourbridge, reached from the village on the 242 bus, which also connects to the request stop outside the Plough and Harrow; routes 9A and 580 run as well, the latter to Kidderminster.

You can still book a slot to walk round the restored rock houses, and it's the domestic detail that stays with you rather than the strangeness of it — a range, a mantelpiece, curtains hung at a window carved into the hillside. Families lived up there within living memory of people who are still around to tell you about it, and the caves at Holy Austin Rock spent longer as somebody's actual home than most houses in most villages ever will.