Distance: 9.1 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the gpx. file from Dropbox
Walk from Stone railway station south through the mid-Staffordshire countryside, and across the unusual surviving Stafford Common, a town common, to Stafford town centre.
The Story
Route Notes
Getting Back
What Stafford Holds in Common
Stretching north from Stafford’s middle suburbs to above the A513 where it is now ringed by new housing estates, Stafford Common is an unusually large surviving scrap of common land near the heart of a major Midlands urban centre.
More common land survives in Staffordshire than is usual elsewhere in the region at least outside of the Welsh Marches and upland parts of Derbyshire, however, Stafford Common is unusual in that it has clung on over the centuries in the face of numerous drives for enclosure.
Stafford Common has its origins in townland used by the inhabitants of medieval Stafford to graze their livestock. Stafford has its origins as a major town in the early medieval kingdom of Mercia, having been established at some point between 700 and 900 CE. It is known that alongside Tamworth and Wednesbury it was one of the strongholds that defended Mercia’s southern heartlands in modern Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire during the viking invasions in the 10th Century. It was during this period that the county system was established and Stafford, rather than the historically more significant Tamworth, was chosen as Staffordshire’s county town.
Doubtless the land that comprises today’s Stafford Common was used for livestock grazing and common cultivation, but it was after Stafford became a significant political centre, under the gaze of the fortifications of Stafford Castle, after the Norman Conquest that the townspeople’s rights to the common became regularised.
This situation broadly prevailed throughout the Early Modern period including the tumult of Stafford’s involvement in the British Civil Wars, and for the duration of the 18th Century. Through a series of acts of parliament between 1804 and 1807 much of the land surrounding the long narrow strip that is today’s Stafford Common was transferred into private ownership and control. The land which was secured through these acts of privatisation in many cases forms modern Stafford’s northern suburbs as well as surrounding farmland.
The land that is today’s Stafford Common was given particular legal definition and protection in 1839 when a further act of parliament confirmed it as common grazing land for the people of Stafford. Over the subsequent century this steadily became refined into the land being primarily used for recreational purposes, though some limited grazing continues to take place on the common to this day, primarily of horses. An activity which connects today’s Stafford Common to its origins over a thousand years ago.
During the 19th and 20th Centuries industrial activities like the construction of the Stafford and Uttoxeter Railway in the 1860s and the creation of a brine refining industry led to parts of the common being taken out of general use. However, these activities long ago ceased, with the former railway now being a greenway, it having closed to most traffic during the 1950s, and mid-20th Century concerns about subsidence leading to brine extraction ceasing in 1970.
Today’s Stafford Common therefore retains broadly the shape defined for it in 1839 and affirmed by the most recent act of parliament governing it which was passed a century later in 1939. It is managed by the Stafford Common Land committe, under whose stewardship as well as continuing to be lightly grazed, it is now a valued, semi-wild, green lung for the people of the town, its scrubby slopes dotted with benches where walkers traversing the site can sit and rest.
Route Notes
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
This walk from Stone to Stafford began from Stone Railway Station.
Exit Stone Railway Station onto the station’s peninsular like forecourt where the West Coast Mainline splits.
Walk a little way towards the centre of the town looking out for a snicket on the right leading down to a footbridge over the railway line, and then down to the side of the Trent and Mersey Canal.
Cross a bridge over the waterway and then turn left walking along the towpath past the locks and canal basins that line the western edge of Stone town centre.
Presently you reach a park where you turn right and follow a path across some scrubby water meadows to reach the side of the River Trent.
Here beside a bridge you climb up onto pavement. Once on the pavement turn right and cross the bridge heading into Stone’s western suburbs.
Soon you come to an underpass which you use to head beneath a main road, and once past a traffic island continue a little way past a short parade of postwar era shops.
Take the second suburban side road on the left and continue walking through a series of modern housing estates lining the top of a surprisingly high ridge until you reach the last house in Stone.
Continue along the road straight ahead passing a scattering of farms.
Past the farms the road becomes completely declassified holding the legal status of a bridleway.
Continue along this track for some distance. Ahead of you to the left rises the enigmatic bulk of Peasley Bank the tallest hill in this part of Staffordshire. While to the right the sounds of the nearby, yet not visible, M6 echo.
Presently you pass a farm converted into small country dwellings, before walking past smallholdings that comprise part of Staffordshire’s still relatively extensive county farms estate.
Pretty much imperceptibly the track running between farms turns into an official road once more and you reach the hamlet of Whitgreave.
Upon reaching the main road in Whitgreave turn left, taking care as this road is comparatively busy, until you reach a footpath waymark where you leave the road and continue to the right heading along a footpath across the fields.
Walking between two outlying houses you reach the side of the busy A34 dual carriageway where you cross and head through a gate into the fields on the far side.
Continue along the footpath walking more or less straight ahead across boggy muddy ground at wetter times of year for some distance. This stretch along footpaths is not far in terms of distance but the terrain makes for slow going when wet.
Presently you pick up an overgrown green lane of sorts, and approach the back of the unusual little sandstone church of St. Leonard, surrounded by a carefully tended churchyard.
Leaving the fields, you step onto the road through the hamlet of Marston where St. Leonard lies and turn right.
Follow the road away from the village steadily approaching Stafford in the distance.
Soon you pass two recently built quite isolated estates of houses which surround two northern, isolated, scraps of Stafford’s surviving common land.
Past the two estates you emerge onto the side of the A513.
Cross the road and turn left, until you reach a stile leading onto Stafford Common to the right.
Once on Stafford Common walk straight ahead, clambering over a fence at the bottom of the hill until you reach the far side on the edge of the main part of the town.
Here to the left of the common you pick up a footpath which leads along a stand of trees at the bottom of the common until you reach a cut through onto the greenway created from the trackbed of the old Stafford and Uttoxeter Railway on your left.
On reaching the greenway turn left walking beneath a road bridge then immediately after the road bridge turn right to reach the road which you follow into Stafford town centre.
Turn left once you reach the road and follow it through Stafford’s Victorian era suburbs, past the prison, and over the inner ring road to reach the town centre. On the way you pass the town’s bus centre just inside the ring road.
From the town centre near the Shire Hall and the Ancient High House museum it is straightforward to turn right to reach Stafford railway station.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
Stafford has a key main line railway station with trains north towards Stoke-on-Trent, Crewe, Manchester, Liverpool, stations further afield and smaller stations in-between. It also has trains south down the Trent Valley Line and through the West Midlands conurbation to Wolverahmpton, Birmingham and stations in between, as well as down to London. Numerous buses across Staffordshire as well as the places like Telford run from the town centre.