The Cask & Pottle doesn't have a bar. Beer comes from a stillage at the back of the room and is carried to your table, because there isn't space for anything else — it seats about twenty, with standing room for twenty more, in what used to be a sweet shop at the end of the High Street. There's no piped music and no television, which the regulars will tell you, without being asked twice, is the whole point: people actually talk to each other. It opened in October 2013 as East Staffordshire's first micropub, won Burton & South Derbyshire CAMRA's Country Pub of the Year, and holds a 4.7 out of 5 on TripAdvisor with four real ales and two ciders that change on a rotation nobody bothers to write down.
That's one end of the High Street. The other end runs down to the River Dove, which here marks the boundary between Staffordshire and Derbyshire — Hatton, on the far bank, is a different county. The castle sits above the village on a steep wooded ridge to the northwest, with views across the valley to the Derbyshire hills, and getting to it on foot from Tutbury & Hatton station means crossing the river and climbing, the paths beyond the gates running bumpy and steep in places. The surrounding country is gently rolling farmland — fields, meadows, small pockets of woodland — nothing dramatic, just the Dove doing what rivers do on their way somewhere else.
The Dog & Partridge, on the other hand, has been doing what it does since long before anyone was counting years in centuries. Tradition puts it back to the 1300s, when John of Gaunt held court at the castle and his son, the future Henry IV, spent his boyhood there; the building itself is mostly 16th- and 17th-century half-timbering with 18th-century coaching-era additions, Grade II* listed, and was once a stop on the Liverpool–London coach route — the Red Rover changed horses here at 4am and 8am daily, a schedule documented from 1817 to 1819, the same years a coach driver was jailed for dodging the Tutbury turnpike toll. Named landlords go back to Lord Scarsdale, who owned it in 1817, and John Gascoigne, the victualler who ran it the year after. It's a Chef & Brewer now, doing belly pork, partridge and sea bass alongside the Sunday roast, with nine guest bedrooms upstairs and a 4.2 rating from over 1,160 TripAdvisor reviews who mostly agree the value is good, occasionally note an overcooked sirloin, and get a 10% discount on cask ale if they carry a CAMRA card.
The Cross Keys, on Burton Street, is family-run and privately owned, with a beer garden extended out over a patio that looks across the Dove valley to the castle. The kitchen runs from burgers and pizzas to gammon and salmon, chicken chilli, a seafood chowder, BBQ beef ribs and something described simply as Indonesian pork, plus Sunday roasts — beef, pork, chicken, sometimes lamb — cooked from scratch rather than pulled from a freezer. The chef, Wendy, gets singled out in reviews for imaginative food at a fair price; the service, less consistently.
The Vine Inn, on Ludgate Street, is reputedly the second-oldest pub in the village after the Dog & Partridge, and its name is thought to come from vineyards once planted near the castle in the 1300s. It welcomes dogs throughout the building, water bowls and treats included, has a heated beer garden with a covered area and screens, and runs its own pool and dominoes teams around a dartboard, a real fire and a landlord and landlady reviewers describe as amazing without much prompting.
Further along Ludgate Street, the New Inn was bought by Black Country Ales, fully refurbished and reopened in August 2023 with twelve hand pumps — typically nine beers and three ciders, six of them rotating and often including something from Black Country Ales itself or a Titanic beer. The food side is simpler: locally sourced filled cobs, pork pies, sausage rolls, a cheese night, and a monthly Thursday curry night.
The Leopard, on Monk Street, began as four cottages, with an alehouse established in the first around 1870 and the rest absorbed as they came free; it's one long, brightly lit room, raised at one end, with a pool table at the other and old photographs of the village on the walls, and it runs its own poker league. The Hourglass, near the castle on the High Street, has mixed reviews but a large gin selection and local ales. The Bubble Inn on Ludgate Street is a pub and Greek grill, serving traditional dishes cooked over hot charcoal, Wednesday to Sunday.
For food shopping, Tebbetts Butchers has been trading in Tutbury for close to 65 years and holds a Food Hygiene Rating of 5. Tutbury Farm Stores, on the High Street, covers meat, vegetables, milk, cheeses, baked goods, eggs, jams, flowers and plants under one roof. Oscar's does made-to-order sandwiches and wraps; the Willows Tearooms does a full English through to homemade cakes and afternoon teas; the Courtyard at No.12 is part of a small cluster of independent businesses set around a courtyard off the High Street. Tutbury Crystal still runs a factory shop in the village, the surviving thread of a cut-glass industry that dates back to 1472 in one form or another — the modern firm traced itself to 1981, when redundant Royal Doulton workers set up on their own, before production moved to Stoke-on-Trent in 2006 and the old Ludgate Street factory was pulled down for flats. A separate Crystal Studio on the High Street still does engraving and repairs. David Walker, of River Graphic Design, put the shopping street's character down to exactly this pattern: "Tutbury's uniqueness is what is great about it. Tutbury is distinctive in that we're all independent traders, which gives the town its character."
The Priory Church of St Mary the Virgin is Grade I listed and has one of the richest Norman fronts in England, which is a claim a lot of churches make and very few can support. The west doorway is fourteen feet high and nine and a half feet wide, set inside six receding arches carved with birds, beasts, imps, flowers and chevron patterns. The second arch in is cut from local alabaster and dates to around 1160 — the earliest known use of alabaster in an English building, and, as far as anyone can establish, the only instance of alabaster used in an exterior arch anywhere in the country. The Historic England listing, following Pevsner, describes the alabaster as the outermost order of the doorway. It is not. It's the second arch from the door, which is either a small error that has been quietly repeated for decades, or a reminder that even the people cataloguing this stuff don't always look closely enough.
Inside, the nave is early 12th-century with distinctive four-lobed western pillars, probably added to shore the building up after some Norman-era subsidence. The south doorway is Norman too, but the lintel above it, showing a boar hunt, is thought to be Saxon — a survivor from whatever church stood here before this one. The lectern is carved from bog oak pulled from the Dove, reckoned at six thousand years old, and a high altar frontal started life as a blue tapestry at the 1937 coronation of King George VI, on loan from Westminster Abbey. At the Dissolution in 1538 the monastic buildings and the eastern arm of the church were pulled down and only the parish nave — the part the ordinary villagers actually used — was left standing, with the last prior staying on as the first vicar. The floor was raised in the 1800s to run heating pipes underneath, then lowered again in 1937 to put the Norman proportions back the way they were. Locally, people sometimes call it the oldest usable building in Staffordshire.
The castle above it all belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster and has done since 1269, and its most famous resident spent a good deal of her time there complaining about the accommodation. Mary, Queen of Scots was held at Tutbury four times between 1569 and 1585, and her objections are on record: she found the castle cold, damp and draughty, her bedchamber had no outward-facing windows, and she rigged a tapestry over her bed for warmth. Of the garden she was allowed she wrote that it was "more like a pig run than anything that might be called a garden," and complained of being kept "in a walled enclosure, exposed to all the winds and inclemencies of heaven." It was during her final stay, under the strict custodianship of Sir Amyas Paulet, that she became entangled in the Babington Plot against Elizabeth I; she left for Chartley Castle on Christmas Eve 1585 and was executed two years later.
By then the village had already appeared in the Domesday Book as Toteberie, valued at four pounds ten shillings, with "forty-two men who live only by merchandise" recorded around the castle — a trading settlement rather than a farming one. Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, later made the castle his main residence and, fleeing Edward II's forces across the Dove in 1322, is thought to have lost a large part of his treasury in the ford — a loss that resurfaced in June 1831, when labourers digging the cotton mill's watercourse found a hoard of somewhere between 200,000 and 360,000 medieval silver coins, now split between the Potteries Museum and the British Museum. Digging the riverbed for more of it has been illegal ever since, by order of William IV.
Two miles away, on 27 November 1944, an RAF ammunition store at Fauld exploded — between 3,500 and 4,000 tonnes of high explosive going up at once, the largest explosion in British history, killing 70 people and leaving a crater 100 feet deep and over 1,000 feet across. The likely cause, an official inquiry concluded, was an airman using the wrong kind of chisel on a bomb detonator. The crater is still there, marked with a memorial. Closer to home, Tutbury Museum, in the old Soup Kitchen at Charity House, is run by volunteers and built around the collection of Aubrey Bailey; the curator, Bob Minchin, and his wife Jeanne have spent years compiling a family-history index that now runs past 75,000 references across some 2,500 surnames.
None of this requires much effort to walk to. A roughly four-kilometre heritage walk follows the old Park Pale earthworks around the village; a shorter loop links the castle ruins to St Mary's in about an hour, starting from the station; a longer route runs from the picnic area at Tutbury Mill across farmland to Rolleston on Dove and back, easy going over six and a bit kilometres. The Staffordshire Way follows the Dove past the village towards Uttoxeter. The Mill picnic area doubles as a playground — stepping stones, swings, a balance beam — next to Thistley Place Meadow, a wildflower reserve with boxes for birds and bats.
For anyone using Tutbury as a base rather than a destination, Alton Towers is under half an hour's drive and Lichfield Cathedral — the only medieval English cathedral with three spires — about twenty minutes. Buses run on the 401 route between Uttoxeter, Tutbury, Rolleston and Burton upon Trent; the station is on the Crewe–Derby line, a twelve-minute walk or a four-minute cycle from the centre, and the village itself sits just off the A50, four miles north of Burton.
On a Tuesday evening the pattern more or less repeats itself: someone at the Vine is setting up the dartboard, the Cask & Pottle is filling with people who came in for one and are still there an hour later, and somewhere in the old Soup Kitchen, Bob Minchin is probably adding another name to the index.
