Milford

The Coaching Inn at the Gates

The Barley Mow stands directly opposite the gates of Shugborough, close enough that you could finish a pint and still make the last entry slot. It was built in 1780 by Sir George Chetwynd of Brocton Hall, purpose-made to catch stagecoach passengers on the road that is now the A513, and it has been doing broadly the same job ever since, just with fewer horses and better coffee. The building has the low, wide, confident look of a coaching inn that never had to reinvent itself, only extend the car park.

Inside, it works as both a proper pub and a food-led one, which is a harder trick than it sounds. It opens for breakfast at 9am, does steak sandwiches at lunchtime and gourmet ribeye steaks at weekends, and covers vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free without making a production of it. The regulars are as welcome as the diners. Three real ales are kept on permanently — Greene King Abbot, Greene King IPA and Morland Old Speckled Hen — and the pub carries a five-star Cask Marque rating, with a 10% discount for CAMRA members, which is the sort of detail that tells you the cellar is taken seriously even though the kitchen gets top billing. Dogs are allowed in the bar. One Tripadvisor review sums it up plainly enough: "There was a good atmosphere, the staff were friendly, polite and obliging and the food was excellent." Another calls it "lovely place to visit while walking over Milford Common," which is more or less the whole pitch — you walk, you eat, you go home.

The beer garden has a children's play area and an indoor Wacky Warehouse soft-play zone, so a wet Tuesday in half term is covered as well as a Sunday roast. For a one-pub village, the Barley Mow is doing the work of about three.

That's the extent of Milford's pubs — one, and it's enough. What it lacks in a second option it makes up for in position: stand outside the door and you're looking straight at the entrance gates of a National Trust estate, with nothing but the width of the A513 in between.

From Milford Common to Shugborough

The village itself is small. Main Road carries the Store at Milford, a farm shop and deli at Home Farm open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm, and the post office a short walk along at number 76. Neither is trying to be a destination. Both are the kind of shop a village needs and a lot of villages this size have lost.

Milford sits on the A513 between Stafford and Rugeley, right on the eastern edge of the Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with the River Sow running just north of it. Milford Common — heath and scattered woodland — occupies the north-eastern corner of the Chase and faces the Shugborough gates directly, so the walk from the pub car park to open heathland is a matter of crossing the road. Two waymarked circular trails start from the Common car park, a Red route and a Green route, each about two miles and an hour, both picking up stretches of the Staffordshire Way and the Heart of England Way. A mile east, at the Punch Bowl car park, a longer route drops into Sherbrook Valley, woodland opening onto heath with a viewpoint over the Chase — there are no facilities on that one, so the Barley Mow is where you go afterwards, not before.

Shugborough itself is the other side of the road, and it earns the space it takes up here. The house is Georgian, National Trust-run, with a walled garden built in 1805 and Park Farm, from 1806, still working — Longhorn cattle, Southdown sheep and Tamworth pigs on loan from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust graze where they always have. The parkland runs down to the river and is scattered with eighteenth-century monuments, follies built when the family had more money than restraint, which is most of what an estate like this needs to be interesting.

The most interesting of those follies is the Shepherd's Monument, built between 1748 and 1758 for Thomas Anson, with a relief carved by the sculptor Peter Scheemakers to a design attributed to the architect Thomas Wright. It mirrors Nicolas Poussin's painting "The Shepherds of Arcadia." Underneath it, carved into the stone, is a sequence of letters — O U O S V A V V, flanked by a D and an M — that nobody has ever explained. Charles Darwin tried. Charles Dickens tried. In 2004 Bletchley Park sent former Enigma codebreakers to have a go, for the publicity as much as anything, and they didn't get anywhere either. It has been sitting there unsolved for over 250 years, which puts it well ahead of most village mysteries, those usually being about who moved the bins.

Estates, Ansons and a Village's Past

Milford itself never got a Domesday entry of its own — it grew later, from the late eighteenth century, out of the Milford Hall estate. What existed here in 1086 was recorded under Bercheswic, now Baswich, held by the Bishop of Chester, worth fifteen shillings, up from ten in 1066. Four ploughlands, meadow of four acres, and a modest strip of woodland. The parish council's own history counts two villagers; opendomesday.org gives 3.5 recorded households, which puts it in the smallest fifth of settlements anywhere in the survey. Milford has never had a church of its own — it fell within Baswich parish and villagers used the church at Walton-on-the-Hill, less than a mile off. The current one there, St Thomas', was built in 1842 by the architect Thomas Trubshaw as a chapel of ease, at a cost of £753, which was presumably a great deal of money and is now the price of a decent sofa.

Milford Hall, the Georgian house the village grew up around, is Grade II listed and still privately owned. It passed to the Levett family in 1749, when the Reverend Richard Levett married Lucy Byrd, heiress of Milford, and the Levett Haszard family have held it ever since — they also sit on the board of Shugborough Hall today, which keeps two of the village's grand houses in conversation with each other three centuries on. The family papers include those of an earlier William Levett, groom of the bedchamber to Charles I, who accompanied the king to Carisbrooke Castle and to his execution. The Levetts still hold an illuminated pedigree tracing their arms back to eleventh-century Sussex and Normandy, which is the sort of document most families would frame and most historians would kill to see.

Shugborough came into the Anson family in 1624, when the estate was bought by William Anson, a local lawyer with better prospects than his job title suggests. 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, Milford Common among it, to the county council — so the ground you're walking on to get to the Punch Bowl was a gift from the same family that built the house across the road.

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

Sport gets a gentler mention. Milford Hall Cricket Club plays in the parkland of Milford Hall itself, a ground the club describes, not unreasonably, as one of the most picturesque in the country — cricket has been recorded on the site for over a hundred years, the current pavilion dates from 1972, and the club has taken the South Staffs County League Premier Division title in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2023, along with the National Village Cup in 2023. Milford Athletic Football Club plays in the village too, with less silverware but the same Saturday commitment.

For anyone wanting more than the Common, the walking extends well past the village boundary. A circular route of about 4.2 miles takes in Shugborough's parkland and a stretch of canal towpath. A longer one, 6.3 miles, links Milford to Little Haywood via Shugborough Park and Seven Springs. The best of the lot runs to Great Haywood, about 7.6 kilometres and two to two-and-a-half hours, tracing the Staffs & Worcs and Trent & Mersey canal towpaths past Tixall Lock and Tixall Wide — a lake-like widening of the canal overlooked by the restored Tixall Gatehouse — and finishing at Great Haywood itself, where the two canals meet at a cobbled junction bridge that turns up in a disproportionate number of people's phone photos. The footpath there crosses the River Trent on Essex Bridge, a Grade I listed sixteenth-century packhorse bridge with fourteen surviving arches and a deck only four feet wide — the longest packhorse bridge still standing in England, built for horses in single file, not for the width of a modern coat.

The canal runs through Milford as well as past it. Milford Bridge, which carries the road over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, was designed by James Brindley, the engineer who built most of the canal network in this part of the Midlands, and the village is reachable by narrowboat if you'd rather arrive by water than by the A513. A towpath cycling route connects toward National Cycle Network Route 5, so the same stretch of water does double duty as a footpath, a cycle path, and a mooring.

Routes In, Memorials and the Walk Home

Getting here by conventional means is straightforward. Stafford station, about four miles off, sits on the West Coast Main Line with connections onto the Trent Valley line and the Birmingham loop. By road, the A513 runs straight through the village, four miles from Stafford and around eight minutes' drive — six miles — from Rugeley. The 826 Chaserider bus connects Milford to Rugeley in about twelve minutes, roughly every two hours Monday to Saturday, and it stops right outside the Barley Mow, which is either good planning or good luck depending on how you like your pubs.

Beyond the village, Cannock Chase keeps going in every direction — heath, forest, and former royal hunting ground, with the German War Cemetery and the Katyn Memorial sitting inside it not far from Milford. The German cemetery holds nearly five thousand graves from both world wars; the Katyn Memorial, put up in 2010, remembers the fourteen thousand Poles executed in 1940, sited partly because the Chase's pine and birch reminded Polish visitors of the forest where it happened.

On a Saturday afternoon with the cricket on at Milford Hall and the dogs off their leads on the Green Trail, the walk back down to the Barley Mow takes you past the Shugborough gates one more time, monument and mystery and rare-breed pigs all sitting quietly behind the wall, and into a beer garden where somebody's children are already three rounds deep in the soft play and somebody's dog has found the shade under a bench. Nobody here is trying to solve the cipher today. It'll still be there tomorrow.