The Midlands' quiet beauty
Apart from our occasional forays into Herefordshire and Shropshire we aim to spend our August, as we have for several years, in South Staffordshire. I am always reluctant to write of the beauties of a part of England that has been home to us for almost the whole 34 years of our married life. But South Staffordshire deserves to be better known. There is a remarkable ignorance about it. Whenever the inevitable questions crop up at dinner parties and people ask me about the constituency they then go on to talk of the Potteries or the Black Country. Yet our rural enclave, including the peninsular of southern most Staffordshire, is far removed in spirit, if not in miles, from heavy industry.
Anyone who wants to savour the delights of a rural walk could do worse than go to Kinver Edge, given to the National Trust at the beginning of the 20th century. Or if your taste is for walking on the flat we have miles of wonderful canal towpaths which go through some of the most gently attractive scenery I know. I never cease to be amazed by the engineering feats of those who created these extraordinary waterways with their complicated locks like that at The Bratch at Wombourne, or their simply elegant Telford bridges like those in Brewood.
Brewood itself is one of the most attractive villages in England, the elegant spire of its parish church dominating the landscape for miles around, and the church itself containing fine alabaster tombs to Elizabethan and Jacobean Giffards, who have lived at nearby Chillington since 1178. Chillington Hall, containing Soane's magnificent Saloon, is now open throughout August. It is a good place to start on a Charles II pilgrimage. The Giffards helped him when he escaped after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and Boscobel and Moseley Old Hall are well worth visiting.
Just three miles away and now, sadly, just beyond my constituency boundaries, is Weston Park, scene of the recent British-Irish talks and one of the most elegant of 17th century country houses. And, yes, it is in Staffordshire in spite of what the BBC told you.
Some of our villages have been rather over-developed in the last 30 or 40 years but it is not only Brewood that has an attractive centre. There is also Wombourne, with its cricket pitch, Trysull, with its lovely village green, and the tiny village of Enville, our local village, which still, mercifully, has its pub and its post office as well as the Church where I am very proud to be Warden, and which we keep open every day so that people can enjoy its quiet beauty.
Ours is not dramatic countryside but it is richly satisfying and amazingly unspoilt considering how close we are to the great conurbation of Birmingham and the Black Country. And as you move over towards the Shropshire border and into that most rural of all English counties you do indeed enter the land of lost content.
