Wigginton

The Old Crown and its summer field

The Old Crown, on Main Road, has an Amazon Locker by the door and real ale knocked down to half price every Monday. It's a Marston's tenancy doing the traditional things well: sirloins, roast beef, fish and chips, an all-day menu with regular deals, a gluten-free menu for anyone who needs one. Dogs are welcome throughout the bar. There's a pool table, darts, dominoes, a real fire, and a quiz on Tuesdays. Live music plays the last Saturday of most months.

Round the back is a proper beer garden, plus a large adjoining field with goal posts for the kids and an outside bar that opens through the summer. CAMRA describes it as "a delightful, dog friendly country pub" with "a huge field & outside bar with fantastic views; open in the summer months." The pub also does weddings, which the field presumably helps with.

A boundary pub and a family farm

Walk far enough down the road and you'll find The Wigginton, a gastropub with pizza and pub classics, its own enclosed beer garden, and Sky Sports on the big screens. It's named after the village and closely tied to it, though the address technically sits just over the parish boundary in Tamworth.

There's no village shop, butcher or post office in Wigginton itself. What there is instead is a turkey farm. Richard Calcott started at sixteen with fifty birds; the farm now rears around two thousand turkeys a year, supplying local butchers and farm shops, run with his wife Deborah and sons Edward, William and George. It won Taste of Staffordshire in 2018.

Church fabric, parish paths and old ground

St Leonard's Church sits with a west porch flanked by circular oculus windows and a square bell turret carried on two Tuscan columns. Inside, cast-iron columns divide the nave from the aisle, and two stained-glass windows by Charles Eamer Kempe, installed in 1897, commemorate a vicar who served the parish for thirty-two years. The lychgate was put up in memory of Charles Edward Mercer, organist and choirmaster here for fifty years. Medieval Wigginton's chapel was attached to St Editha's Collegiate Church in Tamworth, with a Prebendary of Wigginton and Comberford recorded continuously from 1290 until the post was dissolved at the Reformation in 1548.

Six waymarked circular walks, colour-coded by the parish council, fan out from the village, including routes to Syerscote and along the Anker Valley. Hopwas Hays Wood, reached via the neighbouring village of Hopwas, is 385 acres of ancient broadleaf woodland running alongside the Coventry Canal — part of it overlaps an MOD firing range, so it's worth checking firing times before you set off. Closer to home, ridge-and-furrow earthworks still ripple through the fields, and at the north end of the village the outline of a shrunken medieval settlement survives in the ground. A Bronze Age barrow known as Robin Hood's Butt once stood nearby; it's been ploughed flat, but people still know roughly where it was.

From Wigetone to village lives

Domesday recorded the place as Wigetone: eight villans, a bordar and a serf, worth thirty shillings before the Conquest and four pounds by 1086. Samuel Parkes, born here, won the Victoria Cross at the Charge of the Light Brigade for fighting off two Cossacks after his own horse was shot from under him. Gene Kemp, who wrote The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler and won the Carnegie Medal for it, was born in the village too, and started her Tamworth Pig books not far from here.

Tamworth connections and a fifty-year tribute

Tamworth station, on the West Coast Main Line, is a few miles south; the A513 runs past the village, and Tamworth's own castle, SnowDome and the wider A5/M42 network are about two miles away. Fifty years is a long time to play the organ in one church. Someone in the village clearly thought so too.