Norbury

The pub beside the basin

The Junction Inn stands on the basin at Norbury Junction, looking out over what used to be the British Waterways boatyard by Bridge 38. It is the reason most people who know Norbury know it at all.

Food is served all week — lunch daily from noon to 3pm, evening meals Wednesday to Sunday — and reviewers keep coming back to the homemade steak pie, praised for "real pieces of steak, beautifully cooked," and the carvery, with its roast meats and wide veg choice. Thursdays bring a deal: any dish from the specials board, a burger, or fish, plus a bottle of house wine, for twenty pounds.

It's rated 4.2 out of 5 on Tripadvisor, 41st out of 219 restaurants in Stafford, with one review calling the service, food and atmosphere "perfect" and the canalside garden "wonderful." That garden has a play area with swings and a sandpit; inside there's darts and pool, and dogs are welcome on a lead throughout. The beer runs to Marston's Pedigree, Courage Directors and Eagle Bombardier, plus a house bitter, Junction Inn Bitter, brewed specially by Coach House Brewery.

Wharf life and the road into Norbury

Thomas Jones held the licence and did the brewing here in 1896 and 1900. The pub was listed in the 1901 Royal Commission Report on Arsenic in Beer.

Along the wharf, the Old Wharf Tearoom serves breakfasts and home cooking from 8.30am, alongside a chandlery shop, narrowboat hire and boat trips — built for the boating trade, but open to anyone passing.

No bus runs through the village itself, though the Stafford–Newport route passes nearby. Stafford station is about twelve miles off, and by road you're just south of the A519, with Newport and Eccleshall each four miles away.

Medieval Norbury and Telford's embankment

St Peter's, the parish church, is Grade I listed and was largely built around 1340, said to have been raised by Ralph de Botiller, Lord of the Manor, whose tomb effigy is in the chancel. Nearby is what's recorded as the oldest brass memorial plate in Staffordshire. The nave roof is thought to be original, and Pevsner gave the building three pages of his Staffordshire volume.

A short distance away, Botiller also built Norbury Manor, a moated house fed by eight interlinked fishponds. It passed to the Skrymsher family in 1521 and was demolished in the early nineteenth century, leaving only the earthworks and the ponds. Domesday, in 1086, valued the whole settlement at three pounds.

The canal a mile away gave Thomas Telford one of his worst headaches. A local landowner wouldn't let it cross his pheasant wood, forcing a diversion onto an embankment over a mile long and sixty feet high; the marl kept slipping, and it wasn't declared sound until January 1835, six months after Telford had died.

Towpaths, wetlands and festival boats

Walks run off the canal in most directions: a 2.5-mile circular from Norbury Wharf through Shelmore Wood and back along the towpath, a trail on to Aqualate Mere, and Loynton Moss, a reedbed and wet-woodland reserve right off the towpath, where reed bunting are resident and curlew and snipe turn up if you're patient.

Every May Bank Holiday since 2004, the Shrewsbury & Newport Canals Trust has run a canal festival at the junction, with boats gathering on the basin and stalls along the wharf — a couple of days a year when a lot more people than usual find their way to Norbury.