The Dog and Doublet Inn has two explanations for its name, and the pub tells you the second one. Officially, a murder victim's dog is said to have dragged its owner's blood-stained doublet to the door. Inside the bar, though, they'll tell you it was named for a performing dog that used to appear here wearing one. Either way, it's been the pub at the centre of Sandon since 1906, when the Arts and Crafts architect Sir Guy Dawber rebuilt it on the site of an older coaching inn called the Pack Horse.
It sits by the Trent & Mersey Canal, and you can pick up the towpath more or less from the door. There's a beer garden at the front and a courtyard behind it, log fires inside, dominoes and live music some nights, and dogs are properly welcome — bowls and biscuits provided, dog-friendly bedrooms if you ask ahead. Eleven en-suite rooms upstairs, doubles and four-posters among them.
The food runs from crispy pressed lamb scrumpets with carrot and celeriac remoulade to slow-cooked confit pork belly with black pudding mash and a calvados jus. There's potted salmon rillettes with horseradish crème fraîche, a classic chicken Caesar salad with Grana Padano, and a Sunday roast that reviewers put at around £17. One guest reviewing the Caesar salad wrote, "Well, I'd be very happy if I'd made that." Pudding is a pecan tart with hazelnut mascarpone, or a baked salted caramel cheesecake. On tap: Joule's Slumbering Monk, Wainwright Gold, and a rotating guest ale from an independent local brewer.
Beyond the pub, Sandon Village Stores on Lichfield Road does hot and cold food, papers and made-to-order sandwiches — sausage and egg among them — Monday to Friday from seven, weekends till half past twelve. The post office counter, run out of the Parish Rooms, opens Tuesdays only, ten till noon.
All Saints' Church is Grade I listed and dates to around 1200, with a north aisle rebuilt in 1851 as the Harrowby family chapel. Inside are four incised alabaster slabs from around 1600 and the mural monument of Sampson Erdeswicke, the Staffordshire antiquary, who designed his own memorial in 1601 and died two years later.
Anne Hector is buried near the porch. Boswell's Life of Johnson names her "the first woman with whom the doctor was in love," before she married the vicar of Sandon and settled here.
Sandon Hall itself, rebuilt in 1852 in Jacobethan style after a workman's fire destroyed the original house in 1848, sits in 400 acres landscaped by William Emes. The gardens aren't generally open, but a six-and-a-half-mile footpath loop runs the perimeter of the estate, past Perceval's Shrine — a memorial to the assassinated prime minister Spencer Perceval — and a relocated folly the family still calls Lord Harrowby's Folly.
Sandon's own railway station, built with an ornate porte-cochère purely to suit the Earl of Harrowby, closed to passengers in 1947 and is now a private house. Stone covers the trains now, about nine minutes away on the A51; Stafford is around twelve minutes via the B5066. There's no scheduled bus through the village itself.
On a Saturday afternoon in season, Sandon Cricket Club still turns out on its own ground, playing in the North Staffordshire and South Cheshire league, which is about as much fuss as the village makes about itself.
