Little Haywood

Canal Water and Pub Gardens

The Trent & Mersey Canal runs along the edge of Little Haywood, and most walks through the village end up on its towpath sooner or later, whether that's the plan or not. The canal opened in 1777 and still carries boats past pub gardens and back gates, at whatever pace canals carry things.

There are two pubs, and picking between them is really picking an evening rather than a favourite. The Red Lion sits on Main Road on the edge of Cannock Chase, backing onto the canal and the Shugborough Estate boundary. Rolls are £2.50 — cheese and onion, ham salad, sweet chilli chicken, chicken tikka among them — and bar snacks (pork pies, scotch eggs, sausage rolls, a bowl of chips for the vegan option or the dog under the table) run until 8pm. Reviewers keep singling out the cheese and onion sandwich, oddly enough. Dogs and muddy boots are welcome in the bar year-round; the beer garden fills on the first warm day of the year.

Real Ale and the Rugeley Poisoner

The Lamb & Flag, a Grade II listed building dating from the late 18th century, is the quieter option — dark wood panelling, tiled floors, six well-kept real ales including Wye Valley HPA on a rotating cask. There's darts, crib, bingo and a real fire. One review recalls the landlady handing round fresh hot roast potatoes and homemade Yorkshire puddings to whoever happened to be in; nobody seems entirely sure if that still happens.

What's certain is what happened here in 1846. William Palmer, later hanged as the Rugeley Poisoner, challenged a local plumber called George Abley to a drinking contest in the bar. Abley was carried home an hour later and died in his bed that night. Nothing was ever proved. Dickens called Palmer "the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey."

Provisions and Abbey Legends

Shopping in the village is one general store on Main Road. There's no butcher, bakery or deli — the nearest proper grocery run is a walk into Great Haywood next door.

Little Haywood has no church of its own; the parish church is in Colwich, a few minutes away. What it does have is St Mary's Abbey, home to an enclosed community of Benedictine nuns, and a local story about tunnels running from the abbey to Lichfield Cathedral, ten miles off, and to Shugborough Hall, a mile up the road. Nobody has found them.

Packhorse Arches and Tolkien

The Staffordshire Way crosses the Essex Bridge on its way to Shugborough — a packhorse bridge built around 1550, reputedly for the Earl of Essex to visit Elizabeth I, said to be the longest surviving packhorse bridge in England, though only 14 of its original 40 arches remain. From the bridge it's parkland and open Chase, on a circular route back along the canal.

Edith Tolkien lived here for a year from 1916, while her husband recovered nearby from trench fever. It was during that stay, at a cottage on the Teddesley Park Estate, that he began writing what would become The Silmarillion.

The Towpath Way Out

Buses run from near the abbey into Stafford and Lichfield, the first around six in the morning and the last just before ten at night, and the nearest railway station is Rugeley Trent Valley, a few miles off. The canal, though, is still the quickest way out of the village on foot — and probably the nicest.