Wombourne

Canal-side and High Street Pubs

The Round Oak Inn sits directly on the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal, its beer garden running down to the water, with moorings for boats. It's the oldest pub in the village, built in the 1700s on Ounsdale Road, and dog walkers off the towpath treat it as a natural stopping point, though a couple of areas are kept dog-free. Six real ales rotate through, and the early-bird deal, two main courses for £14 or two desserts for £7, is what gets people talking about the chocolate bread and butter pudding.

Up on High Street, The Vine started out as a private house in the early 1700s before becoming an inn in 1851, and still has its beams and inglenook fireplace; Sunday roasts, fish and chips and burgers are the regular order. Further along, the Old Bush runs twelve pumps of Black Country Ales — three regulars, seven that change — under licensees Debbie and Richard Goode, with cobs and pork pies made fresh daily and a log fire behind the games. It's one of Wombourne's three original pubs, along with the Green Man and the Greyhound; the Greyhound is flats now, houses built over its old beer garden.

Local Food and Linear Walks

For food to take home rather than eat out, Boxley's of Wombourne has been a butcher and deli since 1985. Their pork pie won National Meat Product Champion at the Bakers and Butchers Fair, and the sausages have their own awards too.

Three walks run through or near it. The Wom Brook Walk follows the brook for a mile and a half through meadow and woodland, in four linkable sections; a Little Egret turned up there in 2010, the first one recorded on the reserve. The canal towpath runs the length of the village's western edge, south to Kidderminster and Stourport-on-Severn, north past the Bratch Locks and their octagonal toll house towards Wolverhampton and Stafford. The old railway line north is a walking path too.

The Green and Parish Church

The green next to the church still hosts cricket. The club formed around 1860 on land the Shaw-Hellier family gave the village in 1875 "for the sole purpose of recreation," and tennis courts and bowling greens followed. A southern bypass has carried the Dudley–Bridgnorth–Telford traffic around the edge of the village since 1988.

St Benedict Biscop's is the only parish church in England dedicated to Benedict Biscop, the 7th-century founder of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey who taught the Venerable Bede. The 14th-century west tower is the oldest part standing; the rest was rebuilt twice, most recently in 1866–67 by George Edmund Street. Inside there's a memorial to Richard Bailey Marsh by the sculptor Francis Chantrey, a kneeling woman mourning beside an urn.

Domesday and Nailmaking

Domesday valued the whole manor at three pounds and recorded a priest among its thirteen villagers, so there was already a church here in 1086. Nailmaking came later and peaked at eighteen nailshops in the early 1800s; William White, writing in 1851, described a village "occupied chiefly by nailors, who work for the neighbouring manufacturers." By 1889 there wasn't one left.

The Station After the Trains

The old station closed to passengers in 1932, and nobody has run a train through Wombourne since. The platform building is still there, though, doing business now as a café — so you can sit and have your tea exactly where the trains used to stop.