The sign outside The Horns Inn shows a red deer stag, one of three deer species that roam Cannock Chase on the other side of the trees. Inside, the pub has been renovated from what one reviewer remembered as "an old cottage style pub" into a white-rendered restaurant with a pool table, log fires, and a menu running from tomato and mozzarella bruschetta to grilled seabass risotto and a peri-peri grilled chicken burger. Sunday brings slow-cooked roasts and a Cherry Bakewell cheesecake. Dogs are welcome on leads, with water bowls and treats left out by the fire.
Reviews are split. One Tripadvisor visitor wrote "Extremely pleased....Excellent service and the food was impressive," while another titled theirs "Sent It Back!!!" over a stale sandwich. Real ales run to Doom Bar, Butty Bach, Black Sheep Bitter and Coach House Winter Ale, with a beer festival every September.
What settles the argument is the view. The beer garden looks out over Horns Pool, a former millpond with sluice gates and an eighteen-foot waterfall, now a day-ticket coarse fishery with twenty-six pegs holding carp, roach, bream, tench and crucian. Villagers used to skate on it when it froze and then, as one account has it, "repaired to the nearby Horns Inn for refreshments" — which is more or less still the plan.
There is no shop in Slitting Mill itself. For groceries, a post office or a newsagent, Rugeley is about a mile down the road, with its own bus station and a Trent Valley railway station covering roughly the same distance. The 63, 100 and 828A buses run through.
Walking is the other reason to come. The Cannock Chase Heritage Trail runs straight through the village — Panel 17 covers Slitting Mill specifically — following Rising Brook past the old mill sites and up through woodland to the pub. A longer circular walk takes in the Trent & Mersey Canal at Brereton. The village sits on the edge of the Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, so you're on the Chase within minutes of leaving the front door.
The name is the giveaway for what the brook once did. Rising Brook, in the space of little more than a mile, used to power two iron forges, a slitting mill, two corn mills and a colour mill. The slitting mill itself, built around 1611, was reputedly the first of its kind in the Midlands and only the second in England, after one at Dartford in 1590, and by the early 1700s it was taking in some 600 tons of iron rod a year to slit into nail stock. None of it survives — the site became a waterworks pumping station in 1932 — but the village took the industry's name anyway, dropping the older one, Stonehouse, in the late nineteenth century. A philanthropist named Sarah Hopkins, who moved into the house that gave the old name, funded the school that the village church was, oddly, built directly onto the side of. St John the Baptist closed in 2025; its box pews still have cast-iron hoops and ceramic trays for umbrellas, in case you turned up wet.
The Victory Hall, built in 1953, seats 120 and still runs the village's social and charity events.
Mary Sant and her husband William, a blacksmith, lived in a cottage on the old mill site until it was pulled down in 1931. Mary used to make tea for anyone who stopped to paddle or picnic by the brook. It carries her name still.
