The Hand & Cleaver on Butt Lane is a house now. It closed in 2013 and was converted a few years later — one of the two pubs Ranton lost, the reason the parish is now classed as a hamlet rather than a village.
In the 1970s it was Ozzy Osbourne's local. He lived a few yards down the road at Bullrush Cottage, Ranton Green, and is said to have ridden to the pub on his lawnmower, or on horseback. Black Sabbath reportedly played an impromptu gig there once. The pub served Shropshire Gold and had made Michelin's pub guide before it went.
There is no shop in Ranton now, no butcher, no bakery. Whatever you need, you bring with you or drive the three and a half miles into Stafford.
All Saints' Church has a 13th-century nave in the Early English style, with a brick chancel added in 1753. Its small bell turret was rebuilt in the 1940s in memory of Frank Russell and John Owen Timms, two local men killed in the Second World War.
Ranton appears in the Domesday Book: eleven households, worth one pound a year to its lord, Godric.
Ranton Abbey was founded around 1150 as an Augustinian priory dedicated to St Mary des Essarz — St Mary of the clearings — and dissolved in the 1530s. What survives is a fifteenth-century west tower and a stretch of nave wall carrying a Norman doorway three centuries older than the tower itself.
In 1820 Viscount Anson, later the 1st Earl of Lichfield, built a red-brick Regency house beside the ruins as a second seat for shooting parties, with Lord Melbourne — then prime minister — among the guests. It burned down by accident in 1942, while troops forming the bodyguard of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands were billeted there; only the outer walls survived. Patrick Lichfield, the 5th Earl and a photographer, bought it back in 1987 and spent years trying to restore it; permission wasn't granted until 2005.
The ruins stand in a field now, grazed by cattle. One blogger who went looking for them described the abbey as "now privately owned and surrounded by some rather unfriendly cattle" — which still checks out.
The village sits in quiet farmland three and a half miles west of Stafford, about two miles from Gnosall and two and a half from Woodseaves. There's no waymarked trail through Ranton itself, but Gnosall, on the Shropshire Union Canal, has canalside walks for anyone wanting to extend the outing.
There's no railway station in the parish — the nearest is Stafford, off along Stocking Lane and Ranton Lane onto the A518 — and buses are thin on the ground, routes 877 and 14 taking thirty to fifty minutes into Stafford.
Shugborough Estate is the obvious extension — the Ansons' main house, kept on as the grand seat while Abbey House did duty as the hunting lodge, with Patrick Lichfield's old apartments still open to visitors.
Fewer than four hundred people live in Ranton now — 382 at the last count. Out on the Stafford–Newport road there's a cast-iron milepost from the 1800s, giving the distance to each. Nobody has much reason to stop at it. It just sits there, quietly doing its job, telling you how far you've come.
