Needwood village life
Newborough
A small Staffordshire village where forest paths, local food and a remarkable annual tradition meet.
- Best for
- Forest walking and village history
- Give it
- Editorial estimate: half a day, or longer for the nine-mile walk
- Don't miss
- All Saints' octagonal tower and crocketed spire
Photo: Anthony Parkes · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A quiet doorway into Needwood Forest
Newborough rewards an unhurried visit built around a woodland walk, a distinctive church and village places to eat.
The village sits on the northwestern edge of historic Needwood Forest, with rolling farmland around it and a strong thread of local continuity. The Red Lion remains the sole survivor of three former pubs, All Saints recalls the White Hart that once occupied its site, and the annual well dressing has brought natural materials and community craft together since 1978.
Where to go
Places in Newborough
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesThe Old Bakers Cottage Tearooms
A cosy tearoom attached to an eighteenth-century bed and breakfast, known for homemade treats including apple pie.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes for tea and homemade cake
- Locality
- Duffield Lane, Newborough
- Access
- Check the Official site before travel.
The National Forest Way
A 75-mile long-distance route split into twelve stages, linking the National Forest Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire with Beacon Hill Country Park in Leicestershire.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 150 minutes for a selected local section
- Locality
- The wider National Forest area
- Access
- Choose an appropriate stage and check the Official route page before setting out.
Hoar Cross Hall Spa Hotel
A Staffordshire spa hotel and health resort set in countryside within the National Forest.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 150 minutes for a short spa visit
- Locality
- Newborough parish
- Access
- Check the Official site before travel.
Food & drink
1 place
The Red Lion
Newborough's sole surviving pub, with home-cooked food, changing cask ales, a log fire and a beer garden.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes for food or a relaxed drink
- Locality
- Duffield Lane, Newborough
- Access
- Dogs are welcome in the bar area; check the Official site before travel.
Walks & outdoors
1 placeNeedwood Circular Walk
A nine-mile circuit through the rural and historic Needwood Forest landscape of ancient woodland, old parkland, farmland and estate forestry.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 240 minutes for the full nine-mile circuit
- Locality
- Needwood Forest around Newborough
- Access
- Nine-mile route; check the Official route page before setting out.
History & heritage
1 placeAll Saints Church
John Oldrid Scott's Grade II church, built in 1899–1901 with an octagonal tower and crocketed spire on a medieval chapelry site.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 30 minutes for the church and churchyard
- Locality
- Newborough village
- Access
- Check the Official site before travel.
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Three ways to explore Newborough
Signature outings
Needwood on Foot
Follow the nine-mile circuit through ancient woodland, old parkland, farmland and estate forestry around Newborough.
Scott's Stone Church
Look for All Saints' octagonal tower and crocketed spire, rebuilt in 1899–1901 on a medieval chapelry site.
Newborough's Last Pub
Pause at the Red Lion for home-cooked food, changing cask ales and the story of the village's former butcher's shop.
The village story
Newborough Village Guide
A Staffordshire village of fireside food, forest paths and traditions made from petals and clay.
The Last Village Pub
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.
Tea, Stone and Spire
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.
Traditions, Charters and Turf
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.
Forest Paths, Day Trips and Continuity
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.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:The Red Lion at Newborough - geograph.org.uk - 3325304.jpg — photograph by Anthony Parkes; The Red Lion at Newborough by Anthony Parkes. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Red Lion — visitstaffordshire.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Old Bakers Cottage Tearooms — discovereaststaffordshire.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- All Saints Church — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Needwood Circular Walk — nationalforest.org other published source
- The National Forest Way — nationalforest.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Hoar Cross Hall Spa Hotel — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access