The Bell Inn runs a Holden's Cask Ale Club every Tuesday — discounted cask ale, no fuss about it. It's an 18th-century building on Bell Road, in the centre of the village, standing next to the church with a beer garden out front that looks over the neighbouring houses.
The food is home-cooked and reasonably priced rather than showy: roast topside with Yorkshire pudding, ale-battered cod, burgers. On the beer front you get Holden's and Bathams as the regulars, plus a rotating guest ale and whatever pale ale happens to be on that week.
Reviews on Tripadvisor run from "outstanding, delicious and plentiful" to one titled "Miserable barmaid with attitude." Regulars say service dipped after a brewery took the pub over post-Covid. Dogs are welcome, though not in the lounge, and the garden gets walkers off the footpaths on a Sunday.
It is also the only pub left. The Plough Inn on School Road closed around 2019 and became five houses. The Hollybush on Ebstree Road had a brief run as an Indian restaurant before closing in January 2020, weeks before lockdown; a landscaping firm uses the site now. A beer blogger who visited in 2025 called the Bell "a fine (finest)" Holden's house, noting the "Pure Black Country" signage on the front.
All Saints Church sits directly beside it, sandstone, with fragments going back to the 12th century and a rebuilt tower and porch added in 1897. Inside there's an early 17th-century oak pulpit, a rood screen from around 1500, and a font from the 1200s. Pevsner covered it in his Staffordshire volume.
There's no shop in Trysull itself. Seisdon, next door, has a stores and off-licence; Wombourne, a bit further on, has a farm shop at Hinksford and Clive Lloyd's family butchers.
Walking is the other reason to come. The Seisdon and Trysull Round is a circular route on footpaths and farm tracks, mostly off-road, with views to Kinver Edge and Wolverhampton. The Awbridge and Trysull Circular follows the Smestow Brook for about five miles toward Bratch Locks. Trysull Holloway, a medieval hollow way, crosses the brook on a cast-iron bridge dated 1905.
The Domesday Book records the place as Treslei, worth one pound ten shillings, unchanged in the twenty years after the Conquest — ten households, five of them slaves, one mill. The manor changed hands over the centuries until 1894, when Benjamin Howard Mander, of the Wolverhampton paint family, bought the Manor House and remodelled it as an Arts and Crafts showpiece. He also endowed the village with an institute — library, billiards room — which later became a private club and is now houses, its deed of gift having gone missing along the way.
The village hall on School Road began as a Women's Institute building in the 1930s. The cricket club, which plays at the Playing Fields, has records going back to a match against Bridgnorth in 1858. Kinver Edge, with its hillfort and rock houses, is about two miles off. There's no railway station in the village — Wolverhampton and Bilbrook are both around five and a half miles off — but the 15 and 16 buses stop at "The Fox Inn," a minute's walk from the centre.
Mander died in 1912. His widow, Lilian, stayed on in the village for another forty years.
