In the churchyard at St Mary's stands an anvil, worn smooth and kept there as a memorial. It's said to have belonged to William Skelhorn, the village blacksmith, whose forge once stood a short walk away on a site now marked only by a plaque.
Mucklestone sits in the far west of Staffordshire, close enough to Shropshire that the border barely registers, in gently rolling farming country that doesn't announce itself. The historic population was 409 at the last count anyone bothered to take, in 1961 — small enough that the church, rather than a pub or a row of shops, is the obvious place to start a visit.
No pub trading in the village itself could be confirmed, and the only business found is a plant nursery on Rock Lane. Market Drayton, 4.5 miles to the south-west, does the heavy lifting for shops, a weekly Wednesday market and somewhere to eat.
St Mary's earns the detour regardless. The west tower is mid-14th century, the oldest part still standing: three stages of sandstone with angle buttresses, reticulated tracery, gargoyles and an embattled parapet with corner pinnacles. The rest was rebuilt twice, in 1789–90 and again in 1883 by Lynam and Rickman of Stoke-on-Trent, in Decorated Gothic to match the tower. Thirteen windows of Charles Eamer Kempe glass, given by Lady Alice Chetwode, fill the nave. One shows Margaret of Anjou.
That window is there because of what allegedly happened on 23 September 1459. The Battle of Blore Heath, fought a mile and a half away on the heath the A53 now crosses, went badly for the Lancastrians, and local tradition holds that Queen Margaret watched the defeat from the tower. When she saw which way it had gone, she rode for it, and is said to have had Skelhorn reverse her horse's shoes at his smithy so that anyone reading the hoofprints would follow them the wrong way. A plaque on the site of the smithy records the story, though it gives the date as 1450 rather than 1459.
A more elaborate version, recorded by the local historian and blogger Lichfield Lore, has Skelhorn later beheaded on his own anvil for the favour, and Margaret's fury leaving foot-shaped impressions in the tower's stone floor — folklore the source itself suspects a 19th-century parish clerk embellished.
The Domesday Book is blunter. In 1086 Mucklestone had three villagers, one priest, three ploughlands and a single working plough team, and was worth five shillings a year to its lord.
Audley's Cross marks where the Lancastrian commander Lord Audley died on the battlefield, reachable by footpath from a lane off the A53. A short walk the other way, near the edge of Oakley Hall's park, stand the Devil's Ring and Finger, two Neolithic stones, neither in its original position; the Finger stone is holed clean through. Oakley Hall, a Georgian house built in 1710, stayed with the Chetwode family — lords of the manor since around the 13th century — until they sold up in 1919.
There's no railway station nearer than Wrenbury, nine or ten miles off on the Welsh Marches line; the 64 bus links through to Market Drayton and on to Shrewsbury or Hanley. Dorothy Clive Garden at Willoughbridge, twelve acres built into an old quarry and started in 1940 by Colonel Harry Clive for his wife Dorothy, lies within what was once Mucklestone's parish boundary.
Children used to pass an arm through the hole in the Finger stone, the story goes, hoping it would cure whatever ailed them. The stone is still there, in case anyone wants to try.
