The School House sits on Church Hill, opposite St Mary's, in a building that spent its first six decades as Weeford's village school. The Dobson family bought it in 1984 and turned it into a restaurant and function venue, with a terrace looking over Black Brook and eleven acres of grounds. It is, as far as research turns up, the only place in Weeford itself to get a meal.
The fixed-price menu runs £20.50 for two courses or £26.50 for three: breaded goats cheese with beetroot, pistachio and pickled red onion to start, then a chef's homemade pie of the day, pan-fried seabass with chimichurri, or breast of local pheasant wrapped in pancetta with chasseur sauce. There's local butcher's faggots with onion gravy for anyone who wants something plainer, and a warm pistachio brownie or chocolate, cherry and almond cheesecake to finish.
There is no traditional pub in Weeford. A place called the Hollybush sometimes turns up online under Weeford's name, but it's five miles away in Little Hay, outside this parish, so it's excluded here.
For anything other than food, there's Blackbrook Antiques Village on London Road, a family-run architectural salvage yard dealing in reclaimed bricks, stained glass, garden and bronze statuary, fountains and antique lighting. Open daily, just past the A5 slip road, close to the M6 Toll's Junction T4.
St Mary's, across the road from The School House, was rebuilt in 1802 to a design by James Wyatt, who was born half a mile away at Blackbrook Farmhouse in 1746. The south transept holds late-sixteenth-century Netherlandish glass, bought in 1803 from the chapel of the Dukes of Orléans near Paris by Sir Robert Lawley. When it was reinstalled, the panels got muddled up, and one figure now has a leg where an arm should be.
The Wyatts and the Manleys, two families who dominated the parish, kept to opposite sides of the church out of rivalry: Wyatt memorials on the south wall, Manley memorials on the north. Pew 24, near the back, still carries a paper label reading "Servants of Swinfen Hall."
Wyatt went on to build the Pantheon on Oxford Street — Horace Walpole thought it the most beautiful edifice in England — and later worked at Windsor Castle and Lichfield Cathedral, stripping 500 tons of stone from the nave roof to stop it collapsing. He came home to design his own parish church, and when the money ran short, donated the altar, pulpit, screens and font himself. Woodrow Wyatt, who took his peerage title from the village, is buried in the churchyard.
Weeford turns up in Domesday sharing an entry with thirteen other places, its own portion reckoned at roughly 5.5 households.
The Sutton Coldfield to Lichfield footpath crosses the M6 Toll twice and climbs through Manley Wood, a remnant of the demolished Manley Hall estate. From the ridge you can see Lichfield's three spires and, on a clear day, Shenstone on its own hill opposite. Lichfield Trent Valley and Lichfield City stations are both about four miles north; the village sits on the A38 at its junction with the A5 and the M6 Toll.
A stone by the churchyard gate has grooves that might be a medieval scratch dial or archers' marks, or, as the church's own history leaflet admits, "the mischievous workings of some choirboys" a few decades back.
