Staffs of legends
Stunning countryside in a tranquil county that offers Peak family holiday performance
This year has been the summer of the British holiday. And if you’ve ever wished you could leave city life behind and just sit in a field staring at trees, fields and rolling hills while listening to birdsong, then the idyllic greenery of north Staffordshire is definitely for you.
For a whole week our two city kids Carmen, eight, and Rafael, six, did little but play in the woods, collect bugs, chase butterflies, laugh at the funny pheasants, play football and hide in a meadow.
Oh, and swim in the heated indoor pool that guests have exclusive use of at Newfield Green Farm Cottage.
In the village of Marchington, near Uttoxeter, the southern Peak District is right on your doorstep. You can potter about in the countryside that surrounds the Potteries, where you’ll find jagged hills, rocky outcrops, clear streams and gentle limestone dales covered in sheep and dry stone walls.
As well as walking in Marchington Woodlands, it’s a short drive to longer walks including the famous stepping stones at Dovedale and pub lunches.
Ilam Park is nearby with its gardens and play trails. You can visit the copper mine that made the Duke of Devonshire rich and the secret woodlands of Hawksmoor. Beautiful Bakewell – home of the tart and the impressive Thor’s Cave – is a longer drive, but worth it.
A bit more of stretch in the other direction is the National Memorial Arboretum – which has more than 300 different memorials set among 30,000 trees, remembering those who have died serving their country.
Heroes from the British Nuclear Test Veterans, the 1914 Christmas Truce soldiers, the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, Dunkirk Veterans, the Berlin Airlift and of course the Staffordshire Regiment are all remembered here – and there’s a chapel that holds a service every day at 11am (thenma.org.uk).
My grandad Harry was proud to come from nearby Stoke, and there’s the brilliant Gladstone Pottery Museum where you can see the giant bottle kilns of the former Gladstone China Works, now preserved as the last complete Victorian pottery factory in the country (stokemuseums.org.uk).
The National Trust’s Sudbury Hall and its Museum of Childhood, the tranquil reservoirs Tittesworth Water and Carsington Water, and the cobbled streets of Ashbourne are in easy reach.
My kids loved Trentham Monkey Forest, where you can stroll about freely in 60 acres of trees with 130 Barbary Macaque monkeys swinging overhead They are an endangered species with fewer than 8,000 left in the wild (monkey-forest.com reopens February).
Their aim is to undertake research, to create and preserve a gene pool and to re-introduce macaques into the wild. So far, 591 from the forest’s three sister parks have been re-introduced to the wild in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. At the Trentham Estate, which appeared in the Domesday Book in 1086, you’ll
find a rope walk, playground, shopping and Italian gardens, designed by Capability Brown.
If you need an adrenaline rush you could head for nearby Alton Towers. Uttoxeter has pubs, restaurants and a cinema for rainy days.
We preferred going on walks straight from our lovely cottage, eating local cheese from the farmers’ market and having endless barbeques while the kids played pool and table-tennis in the games room. The cottage is owned by a nice couple, as laid back as the fields beyond, who also have a gorgeous shepherd’s hut available for rent that we looked at enviously from time to time.
The south Peaks is only three or so hours from London, and a short hop from Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds.
Our only problem was saying goodbye to the sunsets, birdsong and play of cloud shadows across tranquil fields.