Yoxall

At the Golden Cup

The Golden Cup stands on Main Street opposite St Peter's, its frontage dressed in floral displays for most of the year, much as it has for nearly three hundred years. Billy took it over with his family around January 2025, and it's now the only one of Yoxall's three named pubs still trading — the Crown Inn and the Foresters Arms both shut in 2025, the latter earmarked for housing.

Inside there's an L-shaped dining lounge with a beamed ceiling, and a plainer public bar with a pool table and TVs. The toilets have colourful classical-themed murals on the walls.

Food is home-cooked, with proper chips, and Sunday lunch is roasts only, served at two set sittings, noon and 1.45pm. Sandwiches run £4.50 to £7.25, ham off the bone to crab and melon, and the home-baked steak and mushroom pie is £8.50. Guests keep mentioning Billy, who stops to talk to everyone in the room.

Garden stops and Staffordshire provisions

The beer garden has a patio, a lawn with picnic tables, a play area, and a playing field behind. Dogs are welcome in the public bar, there's a real fire, crib and darts, and Marston's Pedigree is the regular ale. Seven of the rooms are en-suite lets, and there's space out back for caravans and motorhomes.

For food to take home, there's Paul Shum's butchers, deli, bakery and fishmonger at Woodmill Farm — everything on the shelves is, in the shop's own words, born, bred, brewed or baked in Staffordshire and Derbyshire. A deli counter of charcuterie, cheeses, lasagnes and pies, plus bread, fruit and veg stalls. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 8.30am to 5.30pm, 4pm Saturdays.

From the River Swarbourn to St Peter's

The River Swarbourn circular walk runs about three miles from the village, muddy underfoot in places, past carved wooden creatures — a wooden crocodile balanced on one stile — and a bench for a picnic stop. The National Forest Way's twelfth stage follows the river towards the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas, about five miles.

Cross the road from the pub and you're at St Peter's, Grade II* listed. The round-headed south doorway dates to around 1200, and the tower is Perpendicular; the church was largely rebuilt and restored between 1865 and 1868 by the architect Henry Woodyer.

Tombs, rectors and village legends

Inside is an alabaster tomb to Humphrey Welles, who died in 1565, and a tomb to Admiral Henry Meynell by the sculptor Baron Marochetti. A board in the porch lists every rector back to Roger de Yoxall, around 1241.

Local legend holds that horses refuse to pass a spot on the outskirts where a boy's skeleton was found — the blacksmith's apprentice, buried outside consecrated ground after his master's ill-treatment drove him to suicide. George Walton, father of Izaak Walton, lived here too, and Reeve End Cottage still holds the timber frame of a 14th-century aisled-hall house, reputedly the only one in Staffordshire.

Arriving in Yoxall and Weaverslake

There's no railway station — the nearest is Lichfield Trent Valley, eight miles south. The Midland Classic 12 bus runs Burton-on-Trent to Lichfield via Yoxall, not evenings or Sundays, and the village sits on the A515 near the B5016 junction.

Yoxall Cricket Club has played at Weaverslake since 1880, a Saturday side in the Derbyshire County League and a Sunday side in the Lichfield League, with a sports pavilion for a bar and changing rooms.