The Saracen's Head keeps seven llamas in the paddock beside its beer garden. Two of them are named Jenny and Breeze. You can watch them over a pint of Titanic Plum Porter while you wait for the gammon, which the menu promises is expertly cooked.
It's a gastro-style pub with rooms on Stafford Road, doing Grill Night on Wednesdays and Burger Night on Thursdays, breakfast from 8:30. Dogs get their own menu — three mains, two desserts, and a choice of "Pawsecco" or "Bottom Sniffer" dog beer, £9.95 the lot. One TripAdvisor reviewer summed the visit up simply: "The llamas were an added bonus!"
Down at the other end of the village, on the green itself, the Woolpack occupies four low-ceilinged bays that started life as a row of cottages and a blacksmith's shop, owned by the Bagot family since the 1730s. There's a dartboard in the public bar, a large garden running onto the green, and Marston's Pedigree and Wainwright Gold on the pumps. Meals-and-drinks deals run Monday to Thursday.
"This pub is a little gem in the village of Weston," one visitor wrote, "a must visit... a must for anyone passing or near by." Another remembered the server, Holly, by name.
Between the two pubs there's a village shop doubling as the post office, run out of the Village Hall on Green Road, opposite the green and the play area. Weston fields its own cricket team in the Stafford League, with matches on Wednesday evenings.
For walking, there's a circular route out past Gayton toward Sandon — six and a bit miles, three hours, taking in views of Trentham Tower and the gates of Sandon Hall before returning along the Trent & Mersey Canal towpath, past Sandon Lock and its old mileposts, with the Trent alongside for company most of the way.
The village sits at the junction of the A51 and the A518, which crosses the river on the single-arch Weston Bridge — built after the old ford was washed out by flooding in the late 18th century. Stafford is under five miles southwest; the 841 bus runs there via Hixon, and the X41 continues on to Uttoxeter and Alton Towers.
St Andrew's, on the same stretch of high ground above the Trent, has a tower and chancel arch from the early 13th century and a spire added in the 1830s. Two bells hang in the tower from around 1400: Ave Maria, cast in 1402 and still rung, and Katerina, cast in 1500 and now cracked, kept on the floor rather than the frame. A third bell, Ann Shaw, joined them in 1962.
Weston's Domesday entry records one villager, one ploughland, and a value to its lord of two shillings — among the smallest 20% of Domesday settlements. An 1820 brine spring on the neighbouring Ingestre estate later led Earl Talbot to build the Weston Salt Works, piping water across the river and canal to a reservoir in the village. It closed in 1901, the same year as the older works at Shirleywich, where Robert Plot had written in 1686 that the salt was "as good... as anywhere in England."
These days the loudest thing in Weston is probably the llamas, and even they mostly just stand there, watching you eat.
