Weston-under-Lizard

Llamas Beside the Inn

Seven llamas graze in the paddock behind The Saracen's Head, bordering the pub's beer garden, and reviewers mention them nearly as often as the food. "The llamas were an added bonus!" one visitor wrote on TripAdvisor. Another found it "lovely and relaxing to watch the llamas next door."

The Saracen's Head is a gastropub and country inn on the A5 — Watling Street, laid down by the Romans and still carrying traffic east from Telford — with a large bar, two semi-private dining rooms and rooms upstairs from £85 a night with breakfast, less midweek. Dogs are welcome in the garden and bar; it opens daily, 7.30am to 11pm, food from midday.

Food Nights and Village Life

The week has a rhythm: Pie & Pudding Night (£22.95), Grill Night (£39), Burger Night (£36), and two-for-one on pizza and cocktails, plus afternoon tea. Reviewers call the food "really good... reasonably priced" and the service "excellent, friendly" — though a few report long waits during busy events, and at least one burnt chicken burger.

For everything else there's the Blymhill & Weston Community Shop, run by volunteers out of the village hall, open Tuesday to Saturday mornings plus three evenings a week, going since January 2021. The hall itself, rebuilt in 2011, has a licensed bar, Pilates, short mat bowling, a monthly film club, and the annual Blymhill Garden Fete.

Parkland Walks and Lady Wilbraham

The village sits right against the northern edge of Weston Park — 1,000 acres landscaped by Capability Brown for Sir Henry Bridgeman in the 1760s, deer park included. Waymarked trails loop through it: the Knoll Tower Walk, the Shrewsbury Drive Deer Walk, and "Wellbeing Walks" through Temple Wood, where you might see deer close to the path. Footpaths beyond link the village to Tong in Shropshire and to neighbouring Blymhill, part of a network of more than 200 recorded routes.

St Andrew's Church, Grade I listed, was almost entirely rebuilt in 1700–1 for Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham — Pevsner calls it "an enterprise of Lady Wilbraham" — and only the east wall's 14th-century window survived from the building it replaced. Historian John Millar argues she should be recognised as England's first known female architect. A plaque on the tower marks the grave of Honora Sneyd, stepmother of novelist Maria Edgeworth, who died in 1780 aged 28. Domesday, 1086, recorded ten villagers, one smallholder and five slaves at Weston, worth two pounds five shillings a year to Reginald the Sheriff.

Big Events, Aircraft and Connections

Weston Park has hosted more since: in 1998 Tony Blair brought the G8 leaders here for a nine-hour session on cross-border crime; from 1999 to 2017 it was the northern home of V Festival. The park also has a miniature railway, a woodland playground and a yew hedge maze, and the RAF Museum Midlands at Cosford — free entry, home to the Chinook "Bravo November" and the world's oldest Spitfire — is a few minutes down the road.

Cosford station, on the Birmingham New Street line, is an hourly 47-minute journey; buses 877 and X14 stop at Weston Park Entrance, and Telford is seven miles west along the A5.

Almshouses on Watling Street

The 3rd Countess of Bradford built almshouses just west of the churchyard in 1874. They're still standing, still lived in, on a road that was carrying legionaries and their supply wagons two thousand years before anyone thought to keep llamas next to a pub.