The Trooper does a 24oz Tomahawk steak for £65, cooked over an open indoor coal barbecue, and a 7oz Wagyu fillet for £55 with 24 hours' notice. It calls itself Staffordshire's Premier Steak House, a bold claim for a pub on Watling Street, but the chips are cooked in beef dripping and nobody seems to be arguing.
There's a fixed-price lunch Monday to Friday, £10 for two courses, and a "Bottomless Lunch" the pub says was the first of its kind in the Midlands — three courses with cocktails included. Dogs are welcome on leads, and the beer runs to Marston's Pedigree and a changing Rudgate Viking, alongside two rotating guests. The elevated beer garden and heated terrace look over open ground, with house martins nesting under the eaves in summer. It's the top-rated restaurant in Wall on Tripadvisor, though reviewers note service can slow when it's busy.
Wall doesn't have a shop of its own — no butcher, no post office, no bakery. For that you go to Shenstone, a mile and a half up the road, or into Lichfield. What it does have is a village hall on Green Lane, small enough to seat sixty, where the Women's Institute meets on the second Tuesday of every month.
The Wall Heritage Walk follows old drovers' lanes and sunken tracks around the village; the leaflet costs 20p from the museum car park. A shorter loop, about a mile and a half, circles past the Roman ruins in under forty minutes. A longer route follows the six miles from Lichfield to Shenstone station.
St John the Baptist was built in the early 1840s, probably to a design by Gilbert Scott, on land given by John Mott of Wall House. Its octagonal tower carries a clock that came from Shenstone Court, installed as the parish's war memorial. Inside, a stained-glass window by Charles Kempe shows Christ with Mary Magdalene in the garden at Gethsemane. The churchyard looks straight down onto the Roman ruins below.
The village has been free of through traffic since 1965, when the A5 was rerouted around it; the junction with the M6 Toll just north is known locally as Wall Island. Shenstone station, on the Cross-City line into Birmingham, is a mile and a half away.
Those ruins are the reason Wall is here at all. A Roman fort went up around AD 50, at the junction of Watling Street and Ryknild Street, and the bath house and mansio — the official inn, for travelling officials — were rebuilt in stone around AD 130. What survives is reckoned the best-preserved example of either building type in England.
A grave on the site held a bronze bowl marked with a Chi-Rho symbol and thirty fourth-century coins. The latest dates from the reign of the Emperor Gratian, 381 — not long before Roman rule collapsed and people drifted to Lichfield.
A blogger writing as Ragged Robin put it well: "The ruins really did have a superb atmosphere — it was one of those magical places where you could almost sense the presence of (in this case) Romans from all those centuries ago."
The site is free to visit at any reasonable hour, dogs allowed on leads, with parking fifty metres from the gate. The museum beside it is run by volunteers, the Friends of Letocetum, who reopened it in 2008 and still lead the guided walks themselves.
