Maer

The nearest table is at Blackbrook

The pub closest to Maer isn't in Maer. The Swan With Two Necks sits at Blackbrook, on the A53 about two miles down the road, because the Harrisons who owned Maer Hall until the 1970s were strict teetotallers and, according to the parish history, "never allowed" a public house any nearer. Any estate worker caught drunk was given notice on the spot.

It's worth the drive. The Swan is a contemporary gastropub run by the Parogon Group, with Wagyu Fridays using beef from Warrendale Farms, a proper Sunday roast, and Throwback Thursdays where the house burger comes in at £14.95. Reviewers single out the steak and ale pie and the salmon, and grumble a little about pace on a busy night — reasonably, since the beer garden fills with dogs on leads and live music on Sundays.

What Maer has instead

Maer itself has no shop, no butcher, no post office — both Maer and its neighbour Aston lost theirs some years back — so the village runs on what people bring with them.

What it has instead is the mere. Maer Hall, built in stone around 1680, stands above the small lake that gives the village its name, on ground redesigned by Capability Brown. The church stands on the hillside opposite, close enough that the two buildings used to be connected by a bridge.

Carpet, courtship and church

That's St Peter's — twelfth-century fabric under a mostly seventeenth-century rebuild, a tower dated 1670 on the belfry window. The communion cloth is an old Turkey carpet, brought back from Constantinople by a parishioner called Margaret Tether in 1639, and it's still in use.

Charles Darwin proposed to his cousin Emma Wedgwood at Maer Hall on 11 November 1838. The next day he wrote to Charles Lyell: "I determined, when last at Maer, to try my chance." They married at St Peter's on 29 January 1839 and had ten children. Emma ran a Sunday school in the Hall's laundry, teaching around sixty village children to read and write. Josiah Wedgwood II, who'd bought the Hall in 1802, is buried in the churchyard, with a view back across to the house he lived in until his death in 1843.

Hills, hillfort and village life

Walk west and the path runs past Maer Pool and the Hall, picks up the Newcastle Way at Maer Moss, then climbs through Camp Wood to Camp Hill — 216 metres, the highest ground around. South-east of it is Berth Hill, an Iron Age hillfort enclosing about ten acres; Wedgwood cut an aqueduct through its inner rampart in the early 1800s to pipe spring water down to the Hall, and the damage is still visible. Local legend has two Saxon armies facing off from Berth Hill and Camp Hill, a mile apart.

The Village Hall — originally the school the Harrisons built — hosts a Thursday Knit & Natter, table tennis and the WI. Up Haddon Lane, Copeland Cottage began as the Harrisons' gift to the Girl Guides after the First World War and still runs as a camping centre. The Dorothy Clive Garden, a quarry garden with a waterfall and a rose walk, sits on the A51 halfway to Aston.

From five households to 489

Domesday recorded five households at Maer in 1086, worth ten shillings a year to the lord — among the smallest settlements in the book. The 2011 census put the population at 489, small enough that the knitting circle still meets on a Thursday in the school the last teetotal landlords built for it.