Wychnor

Finding Food Beyond Wychnor

Wychnor doesn't have a pub. It used to have a hall, a manor, a railway junction and a full village of houses, and none of those survive either, but the pub is the gap you notice first when you're deciding where to eat. Wychnor Park Country Club, at the old hall site, keeps a bar and restaurant, but it's a private members' club — reception will point you elsewhere if you turn up without a membership card.

Elsewhere means Alrewas, about four miles off along the canal towpath, where the George and Dragon does the job a village pub is meant to do. Barton-under-Needwood has its own pubs too, a short drive the other way. For food shopping, head to Barton Marina on the Trent & Mersey Canal, where the Butcher, Baker Farm Shop runs a deli counter alongside bakery goods from Cress, Springdale, Holleys and TLC Bakery. There's also a butcher on Main Street in Alrewas, if you'd rather sort dinner before you get back.

Inside St Leonard's Church

What Wychnor does have is a church worth walking up the hill for. St Leonard's stands on a ridge above the Trent, mostly 14th century with a tower that's two-thirds rebuilt in brick — probably 17th century work, done in three stages, with diagonal buttresses, a crenellated parapet and gargoyles that don't quite match the red sandstone below them. The font is a 15th-century octagonal stone piece carved with shields; the south aisle holds marble memorials to the Levett family, who owned the hall for 148 years. It's open Saturdays and Sundays, 10 till 5, through May, June, July and September, and every day in August.

In the churchyard, a memorial to Harry Dooling, an eighteen-year-old sailor lost with HMS Barham in 1941, carries the line: "Let him sleep. Where sleep the men who made us free, For England's heart is in the deep, And England's glory is the sea."

Earthworks, Legends and the Flitch

Opposite the church, across a field, the ground is lumpy in a way that turns out to mean something: hollow ways, raised platforms, banks and ditches — the surviving outline of the medieval village itself, abandoned centuries ago. Historic England calls the whole site, hall moat and fishponds included, one of the few places in the county where all of that survives together. Local tradition adds that Cromwell had the church tower's top taken off during the Civil War, suspecting Royalists were using it to watch the river crossing below. Nobody claims that one as documented fact, only as the story that's been told.

The stranger custom is the flitch. In 1338 the manor was granted to Sir Philip de Somerville on condition he kept a side of bacon hanging in his hall, to be given to any couple who could swear, a year and a day after their wedding, that they hadn't once regretted it. Only three couples ever managed it. By the time Horace Walpole visited in 1760, the bacon had gone unclaimed for thirty years, so a carved wooden flitch hung there instead — a monument to a prize nobody could win.

Following the Canal Towpath

For walking, the Alrewas–Wychnor loop is just over four miles: canal towpath past moored narrowboats, then a stile up a grass bank to the church, muddy enough near the country club to want boots. A longer nine-and-a-half-mile circuit out of Barton-under-Needwood takes in Wychnor, Alrewas and Yoxall Meadows, with an information board at Wychnor filling in the history for anyone who wants it.

Arriving in a Vanished Village

Lichfield Trent Valley station is the nearest with regular trains, about eight miles off, and the A38 — still following the line of the Roman road it replaced — crosses the Trent at Wychnor Bridges. The 2021 census counted 497 people in the parish. Domesday counted six households, and didn't think to name a single one of them.