Salt

An inn built around salt

There's a cupboard built into the inglenook fireplace at the Holly Bush Inn that was made for storing salt, from back when salt was worth building furniture around. The pub sits at Willowmore Banks, where the Trent, the Trent & Mersey Canal and the A51 all run close together, and it reopened on 15 January this year after closing the previous September for refurbishment — new flooring, lighting, fresh colours. The tenancy passed to the Hewitt family: Mike and Dawn run the bar, and their son Callum is head chef.

The menu runs from fish fingers and chips through chicken goujons, beer-battered cod and Whitby scampi, up to a burger called the Longhorn — a chargrilled beef patty on a brioche bun with tomato relish, baby gem, apple and cherry cheddar, a pickled gherkin, and skin-on fries with slaw. The cheese on the board comes from Fowlers of Earlswood, self-described as the oldest cheese-making family in England. Dogs are welcome in the bar and snug, with a menu of their own.

Garden ales and the towpath beyond

There's a large garden behind the pub and more seating out front, and on cask you'll usually find Sharp's Doom Bar alongside a couple of guest ales. Tripadvisor rates it 4.2 out of 5 across 333 reviews, 27th of 220 places to eat in Stafford. One reviewer wrote they were "absolutely stuffed but forced to have a pudding which were amazing too."

Salt has one pub and no shops of its own. For a farm shop you'd walk the towpath to Great Haywood, where the Trent & Mersey meets the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal at a horseshoe bridge.

Boots, bridges and Gothic surprises

The towpath is the reason to bring boots. North towards Stone it runs flat through the meadows of Weston, Salt and Sandon. A circular walk from the Holly Bush car park covers about four miles and nine stiles, with one gentle climb through Sandon Park and two crossings of the A51 via the central grass strip. Further along, Essex Bridge — a sixteenth-century packhorse bridge with fourteen of its original forty arches still standing — is reckoned the longest surviving packhorse bridge in England.

St James the Great, the parish church, is Victorian rather than medieval, built in the early 1840s on land given by the Earl of Shrewsbury — Historic England calls it "a well-detailed mid C19 Gothic revival church retaining original character and detail." The rose window and bell turret sit at the east end instead of the more usual west, and the wooden rood screen was designed by Augustus Pugin, who was busy then with the Houses of Parliament.

From Selte to the Stafford bus

The Domesday Book records the village as Selte: twelve households and a mill, held by Gilbert under Robert of Stafford. The name comes from the salt pits once worked in the area — the cupboard in the pub's fireplace is a much later echo of the same trade.

Stafford station is about three miles off, fifteen minutes by car, and the 841 bus runs through to Stafford and Uttoxeter.

The army hut that learned to dance

The village hall started as an army hut on Cannock Chase, dismantled and rebuilt here in 1927. It's hosted yoga and art classes since, and in 1943 an RAF dance drew about two hundred people through the door — a lot of dancing for a village this size.