The Red Lion on Duffield Lane was the village butcher's shop in the nineteenth century. It's the only pub left in Newborough now — the White Hart and the Buffalo Inn both closed long ago, the White Hart's old site absorbed into the churchyard next door.
The kitchen does rotisserie chicken with sweet potato chips and a side salad that one TripAdvisor reviewer called "truly fab and excellent value for money," plus roast beef, gammon, and Sunday roasts served midday to six. Puddings run to sticky toffee pudding, chocolate custard and cheesecake. Thursday is pork pie night, and there's a quiz on Sundays.
The Webb Hotel Group took it over in 2018 and refurbished it in 2025 into a lounge bar with two changing cask ales, more than forty gins, and a log fire. Dogs are welcome in the bar, there's a beer garden out back, and the pub won Staffordshire's Pub of the Year in 2021. During the Covid lockdown it turned itself into a shop for the village.
For something quieter, the Old Bakers Cottage Tearooms sits attached to an eighteenth-century bed and breakfast on Duffield Lane, and does a homemade apple pie that walkers and cyclists make a point of stopping for.
All Saints Church stands on the site of the old White Hart, rebuilt between 1899 and 1901 to a design by John Oldrid Scott, in stone brought from Hollington, Pateley Bridge and Harrogate. It has an octagonal tower and a crocketed spire. The parish register goes back to 1601, when All Saints was just a chapelry of Hanbury.
One vicar here in the 1880s, Frederic Beaven, became Bishop of Mashonaland.
Every May bank holiday since 1978, when headmistress Mrs Bernice Brown started the tradition, wooden boards are packed with wet clay and decorated with flower petals, leaves, cones and bark. It's been skipped only twice — in 1986, for the sewers, and in 2001, for foot-and-mouth.
Domesday knew the place as Edgareslege, worth £5 a year, with eighteen villagers, nine smallholders and one slave working seven ploughlands. It stayed Agardsley until 1263, when Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby, granted it a market and borough charter and renamed it Newborough — a new town that never really became one.
Charles Marlow, a jockey born in the hamlet of Thorney Lanes, won the Derby and St Leger in 1849 on The Flying Dutchman, went unbeaten until the 1850 Doncaster Cup, then beat the same horse in a rematch at York the following year, by a length.
The Needwood Circular Walk, a nine-mile loop through what's left of Needwood Forest, passes close by, and the 75-mile National Forest Way runs through the wider area too. Newborough sits on the forest's northwestern edge, three miles from Hanbury and eight from Burton-upon-Trent. From Hoar Cross Hall, the spa hotel within the parish, it's just over half an hour on foot to the Red Lion — under ten minutes by car.
The National Memorial Arboretum is about ten miles off, Alton Towers twenty, and Abbots Bromley — home of the Horn Dance — a short drive away.
The village has been shrinking since 1881, when 651 people lived here; the last census counted 476. Most of them, you'd guess, still turn up for the well dressing.
