The Spread Eagle sits on the bridge over Alder Brook and has been most things a building can be before it settled on pub: schoolhouse, courthouse, alehouse, hotel, dating to around the 16th century. It was the Mosley Arms first, then the Eagle Child, before becoming the Spread Eagle in 1851, taking its name and emblem from the Mosley family, who arrived in Rolleston in 1614 and took a spread eagle as their crest.
Inside it's open-plan, linked rooms around a central bar, high and low beamed ceilings, a real fire, free Wi-Fi. Wednesday is Vintage Pie Day, Friday is Fish Day, and the real ales run to Marston's Pedigree and Sharp's Doom Bar plus two changing guests, the pub Cask Marque accredited to five stars. Out the back there's a courtyard, a garden and a narrow patio over the brook, picnic tables set right against the water.
The Jinnie Inn, on Station Road, is named after the old North Staffordshire Railway branch line locals called the Jinnie. Nothing here comes out of a bag, according to the pub itself, and in summer a wood-fired pizza oven runs alongside fish and chips, lamb, lasagne and a Sunday dinner you can take away — 4.4 out of 5 across more than 1,500 reviews on Restaurant Guru, low timber-beamed ceilings, an open fire in winter, a beer garden for summer.
Ian Barker Butchers on Chapel Lane has traded more than 45 years, sourcing meat from local farms, curing its own bacon and making sausages, burgers and pies by hand. The Butcher's Pie Bakehouse does pies, sandwiches, rolls and homemade sweet slices. There's a Co-op for groceries and Starbuck's Newsagents for everything else — no relation to the coffee chain, just a shop that got there with the name first.
St Mary's Church has its main door on the north side, which is the wrong side by most churches' logic. The south entrance was kept private, for the Mosley family up at Rolleston Hall, who had reserved seating in the south aisle. The Romanesque core dates to 1130, the tower to the 14th century, restored in 1892 by Sir Arthur Blomfield. There's Kempe glass in the chancel and eight bells, the oldest cast in 1586.
Rolleston Hall is gone, sold at auction in 1923 and mostly demolished by 1925; only its lake and two entrance lodges remain. Sir Oswald Mosley, later the founder of the British Union of Fascists, spent part of his childhood there — a fact the village carries rather than advertises. Rolleston first appears in a charter of 942, and by 1086 Domesday records 36 households here, valued at £10 a year to the lord, Henry of Ferrers.
Ten waymarked local walks start from the lychgate at St Mary's, five staying inside the parish, the rest reaching Anslow, Tutbury and Hatton, one passing Tutbury Castle's ruins on their bluff above the Dove. Two main roads run through the village, the A38 is close by, and the 1A and V1 buses call through between Burton, Tutbury and Hatton.
"Everyone gets on here, there's never been any animosity in Rolleston," a long-time resident told Staffordshire Live. The village's cricket club has been going since 1871 and now fields four senior sides, which is a lot of cricket for a place this size.
