Two painted fools' heads look out from the sign of The Loggerheads pub on Eccleshall Road, captioned "we three loggerheads be" — the joke being that whoever stops to read it is the third fool. The village took its name from the pub, not the other way round, and at some point both dropped the "Three."
You're on the A53 between Market Drayton and Newcastle-under-Lyme, close enough to Shropshire and Cheshire that neither county quite claims you. Burntwood woodland runs along one edge; open farmland and, on a clear day, the Shropshire Hills lie the other way.
The pub started out as a coaching inn on the Newcastle–Shrewsbury road in the 1700s, later became a hotel, and has since grown into a small bar with a pool table and a bigger lounge. The beer garden looks out over open countryside, and dogs are welcome throughout. Robinsons Trooper and Kirkstall Three Swords stay on permanently rather than rotating, and the cellar holds a five-star Cask Marque rating from Potteries CAMRA. Food runs to "hearty classics and fresh flavours," with veggie and vegan options and a summer offer of two kids eating for £1 with an adult main. The Shropshire Star gave the steaks four stars in 2010: "tender, tasty and juicy and easy to cut."
The pub is also reputed to keep three ghosts: a man in the garden, a woman in the kitchens, a dog that runs around the building. One landlady has described watching a figure at the bar walk through a wall at midday. As the Shropshire Star reviewer put it: "Talk of ghosts did not spoil her meal."
There's no independent shop, butcher or bakery trading in the village itself.
The walking makes up for it. The Loggerheads Loop is a five-mile circuit through Burnt Wood and Blore, joining a stretch of the Newcastle Way. A longer loop through Burntwood runs 5.9 miles and takes about two and a half hours. The wood — roughly 250 acres, managed by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust — was originally oak, is now mostly conifer, and is known for its butterflies and moths.
Loggerheads doesn't appear in the Domesday Book — it grew up later as a hamlet at a road junction in the old parish of Ashley, and wasn't named or made its own civil parish until 1984, combining Ashley, Mucklestone and Tyrley.
Mucklestone's church, St Mary's, keeps a 14th-century west tower. In the churchyard stands an anvil said to have belonged to the blacksmith William Skelhorn, who reputedly reversed the shoes on Queen Margaret of Anjou's horse after the Battle of Blore Heath in 1459, a mile and a half away, so pursuers would follow her hoofprints the wrong way. She's said to have watched the battle from the tower before fleeing.
For much of the twentieth century Burntwood was also a sanatorium, treating tuberculosis patients with rest, quiet and fresh air — beds wheeled outdoors, no heating. Streptomycin made it obsolete, and the last two patients left in October 1969.
Buses reach Market Drayton in about ten minutes, and Service 64 continues on to Newcastle-under-Lyme and Hanley. Loggerheads FC turn out on Sundays in the North Staffordshire league, and Ashley Memorial Hall has been run by a residents' committee since 1953.
The actor Francesca Mills grew up here — a village of just over four thousand people, named for a joke on a pub sign that's still hanging outside it.
