Milford

The Coaching Inn at the Gates

The Barley Mow stands on Main Road near Milford Common and Shugborough Estate. Built in 1780 by Sir George Chetwynd as a coaching inn for stagecoach passengers, it still serves travellers along the A513 and walkers heading onto the Common.

Inside, the pub welcomes diners and drinkers with three regular cask beers and Cask Marque accreditation. A 10% cask-beer discount is available to CAMRA members. Dogs are welcome in the bar, and the garden play area and indoor Wacky Warehouse give families another option after a walk.

Separate dining and drinking areas accommodate vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free dishes, making the pub a practical meal stop after a walk across Milford Common.

After Milford Common, the pub is a convenient stop; the estate's house and park are reached through Milford Gates.

From Milford Common to Shugborough

Milford's Main Road links the pub with paths across Milford Common and gives the village a natural starting point for the neighbouring estate.

Milford Common has Red and Green circular trails, each roughly two miles and an hour. The Red begins on the Heart of England Way, while the Green joins the Staffordshire Way towards the Punch Bowl. A Blue Trail can extend either circuit through Brocton Coppice. The longer Great Haywood Tolkien Trail continues through Sherbrook Valley and Shugborough's parkland.

The Georgian house, a walled garden dating to about 1806 and Park Farm sit within riverside parkland dotted with monuments. Southdown sheep and Longhorn cattle graze at the farm, while Tamworth pigs are kept in the South Walled Garden. The Shepherd's Monument is among the estate's distinctive features.

The Shepherd's Monument was built in the late 1750s, with its outer columns added in 1763. Its marble relief, carved by Peter Scheemakers, adapts Nicolas Poussin's painting "Et in Arcadia Ego"; Thomas Wright is believed to have instigated the design. Below the relief, the letters D O U O S V A V V M remain an unsolved puzzle among the parkland monuments.

Estates, Ansons and a Village's Past

Milford developed from the late eighteenth century around its hall estate. The older Domesday record is for Bercheswic, or Baswich, rather than Milford itself. St Thomas' at Walton-on-the-Hill was designed by Thomas Trubshaw and completed in 1842 as a chapel of ease.

Milford Hall is Grade II listed, and its main building dates to the eighteenth century. The Byrd family may have built it before it passed to the Levetts. The hall remains a marker of the estate around which Milford developed.

The estate came into the Anson family in 1624, when William Anson, a local lawyer, bought it. It stayed with them for three centuries; they became Earls of Lichfield, and Admiral George Anson's naval prize money paid for the major eighteenth-century expansion of house and park that you walk through today. After the 4th Earl died in 1960, the estate passed to the National Trust in lieu of death duties, was leased to Staffordshire County Council and opened to the public in 1966, with full National Trust management returning in 2016. In 1957 Lord Lichfield had already given away 2,120 acres of unenclosed land, including Milford Common, to the county council — ground gifted by the same family that built Shugborough Hall.

Not everything in Milford's history is Georgian and ornamental. On 18 September 1990, the retired Governor of Gibraltar, Sir Peter Terry, was shot at his home on Main Road by the Provisional IRA, in reprisal for authorising the SAS operation that killed three IRA members in Gibraltar two years earlier. He was hit in the face, leg, arm and abdomen; his wife Betty was grazed by a bullet that passed through an interior wall. Surgeons took three bullets and fragments out of him in a five-hour operation, and he survived. It is not the kind of fact a village puts on a plaque.

Cricket, Canals and Longer Walks

The village cricket ground sits in the parkland of the hall. The club won the National Village Cup in 2023 and the South Staffs Premier Division in 2025, then secured a place in Division Two of the Birmingham & District Premier Cricket League for 2026.

For a longer outing, the Great Haywood Tolkien Trail starts at Coppice Hill car park. It passes through Brocton Coppice and Sherbrook Valley, by the Punch Bowl and across the estate towards Great Haywood. Nearby, Essex Bridge crosses the River Trent. The Grade I bridge is probably sixteenth-century, with fourteen spans and a passage only four feet wide.

Milford Bridge No. 105 crosses the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal north of Home Farm. The late-eighteenth-century accommodation bridge was designed by James Brindley and has a ramp down to the towpath on its west side. It is one of the country's earliest turnover bridges. The canal opened fully to traffic in 1772 and runs between Great Haywood and Stourport.

Routes In, Memorials and the Walk Home

The A513 runs through Milford between Stafford and Rugeley. Route 826 connects the village with Rugeley and stops near the pub, while buses also stop outside the estate.

Cannock Chase contains the German Military Cemetery and the Katyn Memorial. More than 4,900 people are buried at Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery: 2,143 from the First World War and almost 2,800 from the Second World War. The Katyn Memorial commemorates Polish victims of the Soviet killings of 1940.

A walk across Milford Common can end at the pub. Keep dogs on a lead wherever the Chase's access rules require it, especially during the ground-nesting season and around livestock. The estate's monuments and the Shepherd's Monument inscription offer a reason to return.