Seighford

The pub the village kept

The Holly Bush Inn on Seighford Lane once closed altogether and reopened for a spell as an Indian restaurant. When that folded too, the village bought the building back. It has been run since 2012 as a community pub by Seighford Pub Company Ltd — a roundabout way of saying the village wasn't giving the place up.

It started life as a cottage around 1675, later became a beerhouse, and still has its original timber framing, a real fireplace and the original snug.

Sunday brings the Capitan's Carvery: all four meats, home-cooked roast potatoes, cheese sauce. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it the nicest pub carvery they'd ever eaten; another rated it simply the best carvery yet. Fresh vegetables and well-cooked meat get singled out, along with, oddly specifically, the milkshakes. Book ahead — Sunday lunch fills fast enough that not booking is its own kind of decision.

From the bar to the patchwork tower

On the bar there's Everards Tiger and Titanic Plum Porter among the cask ales, three changing guests alongside two regulars. Beer garden, bar skittles alley, dogs on leads welcome, and it's five minutes from Junction 14 of the M6.

Seighford itself has no shop, butcher or bakery. The pub, the church and Cooper Perry Primary School — named after a former vicar's son who went on to run London University — are more or less the amenities, and the pub does most of the work.

St Chad's Church is the other thing you notice on arrival, mostly because its tower doesn't match the rest of it. The original crossing tower collapsed in 1610, taking the south aisle and main entrance with it, and the village rebuilt in brick using a local builder named Clay. Saxon and Norman stone below — the arcades carry billet and lozenge carving on their capitals — brick above, undisguised for four hundred years.

Tombs and Domesday

Inside there's a Jacobean pulpit, a churchwarden's chest dated 1610, and the alabaster tomb of William Bowyer, who died in 1593, carved with his effigy and his wife Mercy's, both in ruffs, with a swaddled infant among the smaller figures.

The Domesday Book records the place as Cesteforde: ten villagers, six smallholders, meadow of five acres, woodland measuring four leagues by two. No value survives for it.

Hall stories and field paths

Seighford Hall, just outside the village, was built in the late sixteenth century by Richard Elde, Treasurer and Steward to the Earl of Essex. It later did time as a Home Guard post, a WAAF hostel, a police driving school and a 1970s nightclub called Blazes, before ending up derelict. A sixteenth-century oak overmantel carved with Elizabeth I's coat of arms, once part of the Hall and estimated at up to £5 million, was removed by a caretaker who said it had woodworm, and now sits in storage under a council injunction.

A figure-of-eight walk loops out from the village on lanes, farm tracks and field paths — flat, no stiles, though it can turn muddy. Doxey Marshes, a wetland reserve near Stafford, is within easy reach for more.

Airfield echoes and a Japan connection

RAF Seighford flew from 1943 to 1947 and part of the old airfield is still used by gliders. Stafford station is about three miles off, Norton Bridge closer still, and buses run along Seighford Road rather than through the village itself.

Richard Cocks was baptised at St Chad's in 1566 and went on to run the East India Company's trading post at Hirado, in Japan. He'd have known the tower before it fell — the swaddled child on the Bowyer tomb, close by, has been watching the brick half arrive ever since.