The Wheel's steak and ale pie comes with home-made chips, and the diners who review it on TripAdvisor go out of their way to specify that they're proper chips, as though the point needed making. The pub sits on Leek Road next to Longsdon Memorial Hall, open-plan bar seating around forty, a real fire going, Draught Bass on one pump and a rotating guest ale on the other.
The menu also runs to mixed grills, treacle pudding and a vegetarian bake for anyone not eating meat. The beer garden looks out over the surrounding moorland, and children are welcome in it until 9pm, though dogs have to make do with the outside seating rather than the bar. "Not lavish or posh," is how one TripAdvisor reviewer put it, "just a friendly local clean tidy pub with lovely staff and good food."
Down the hill at Denford, where the Caldon Canal runs, the Hollybush occupies a converted flour mill and does home-made food at lunchtime and again in the evening, with a proper Sunday roast. Timothy Taylor Landlord and Thwaites IPA are the regular pulls, dogs are allowed on leads, and the garden runs down toward the towpath.
There's no shop left in Longsdon itself, just the two pubs. A post office once operated at Ladderedge from 1888 and later opposite the church, but that's history now, not somewhere you can walk to.
The village's third pub, the New Inn, hasn't poured a pint since 2008. It stands at the junction of Leek Road and Denford Road, closed and decaying. Leek resident Tom Burnett called it "hardly an inspiring advert for the area." A developer wants to demolish it for a farm shop and restaurant; the parish council said it would rather have four houses.
Walking here mostly follows water. The Caldon Canal's Leek Branch runs the towpath into town through a tunnel and past four Grade II-listed stone bridges, and a two-mile heritage walk from the Hollybush follows the canal past the ruined limekilns of the old Cheddleton Lime Company, with an extension into Deep Hayes Country Park — sixty acres of wood, meadow and pool off the A53, with a visitor centre. Denford's own name was recorded as "Derneford" in 1341 — a hidden or secret ford — which still fits a hamlet tucked into the valley, with a bridge across the brook there since at least 1529.
St Chad's stands on the A53, built in 1903–05 by the Arts-and-Crafts architect Gerald Horsley, who designed the chancel gates and altar frontals himself. The Victoria County History called it "one of the most complete gifts that the diocese of Lichfield has ever known."
Longsdon turns up first as "Over Longsdon" in 1278, one of twelve townships making up the ancient parish of Leek, and didn't become a parish in its own right until 1894.
Leek is a mile and a half up the A53, with markets on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. It lost its own station along with Wall Grange in neighbouring Cheddleton, which closed in 1956, so the nearest working mainline station is Blythe Bridge, about twelve miles by road.
On the third Wednesday of the month, the Hollybush puts on a folk night, and there's an outdoor play area for children the rest of the time.
