Stretton Aqueduct carries the Shropshire Union Canal thirty feet over the A5 on six cast-iron arch ribs, built by Thomas Telford in 1832 and cast by William Hazledine of Shrewsbury. It opened in 1835, at a skewed angle across Watling Street, and it is still doing the job.
The village sits below it, on the River Penk between Penkridge and Brewood, the canal running along its western edge. Walk the towpath north-west through woodland and you reach the first lock and winding hole at Wheaton Aston, a mile and a half on.
At Stretton Wharf, just north of the aqueduct, Industry Narrowboats sells diesel and boating supplies to passing crews. Dawn Tigwell manages the yard — the only trading business in the village, as far as the record shows.
There is no pub in Stretton itself. Brewood, under three miles off, has the Lesters Arms gastropub, the Bridge Inn, and the Lion Hotel, now the Staffordshire Grill Country Pub & Steakhouse. Penkridge, the same distance the other way, has the Boat Inn, the Cross Keys, the Star Inn, and the White Hart, a half-timbered building from about 1536 reputedly visited by both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, on separate occasions, plus a Wednesday and Saturday market.
St John's Church has a Norman chancel from the 12th century, built in random coursed red sandstone, with a nave and transepts rebuilt in 1860 by the architect Edward Banks. A bellcote on the west gable holds a single bell, and it began as a chapel of ease to Penkridge, only becoming its own parish in 1866. In the churchyard, a chest tomb with pilastered angles marks General Henry Monckton of Stretton Hall, and the Bowker memorial carries a gadrooned urn — more ornamentation than most villages this size manage for their dead.
The Domesday survey recorded twelve households here — four villagers, eight smallholders — with six ploughlands, a mill, and six acres of meadow, the whole manor valued at sixteen shillings to the lord, Hervey of Stretton. Seven hundred metres east of the river crossing lay Pennocrucium, a Roman posting station on Watling Street occupied from the first century to the fourth; nobody knew it was there until 1946, when aerial photographs picked out the cropmarks.
The Congreve family held the manor from the 14th century; Stretton Hall itself was built around 1700 by John Congreve, and passed to the Moncktons of Somerford Hall in 1845. A later Monckton, Joanna Bird Monckton, was High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1995, and the hall remains privately owned, its early-18th-century garden reduced to what listing records call an overgrown "wilderness with rides."
Chillington Hall, Boscobel House — where Charles II hid in the Royal Oak after Worcester — and Weston Park's thousand acres of parkland are all close by; Cannock Chase is twenty minutes further.
Penkridge station, on the West Midlands line, is the nearest railway stop; the 877 and 878 buses run through the village between Stafford and Wolverhampton, via Wheaton Aston and Brewood.
Stretton had its own post office once, its money orders and telegrams handled via Brewood. By the 1961 census the population was 176 — smaller in spirit than the number suggests, the sort of place you pass over on a boat without quite registering you've arrived.
