St Mary's Abbey, Colwich

Little Haywood is a village in Staffordshire, England. For population details as taken at the 2011 census see under Colwich. It lies beside a main arterial highway, the A51 (linking the English Midlands with Liverpool) but traffic through the village is mainly light, owing to this bypass. Nearby also is the West Coast Main Line railway, the Trent and Mersey Canal and beside it, the river Trent. Little Haywood is about 125 miles (201 km) northwest of London, about 25 miles (40 km) north of Birmingham, 4 miles (6.4 km) northwest of Rugeley and 6 miles (9.7 km) east of Stafford. Little Haywood is cited in the Domesday Book of 1086. Although originally a small village, housing expansion during the 1980s has created a commuter village and most of its inhabitants have employment far outside the confines of the Haywood area.

The Colwich rail crash occurred on the evening of Friday 19 September 1986 at Colwich Junction, Staffordshire, England. It was significant in that it was a high speed collision between two packed express trains. One driver was killed, but no passengers died because of the great strength of the rolling stock involved, which included examples of Mk1, Mk2 and Mk3 coaches.

Colwich railway station is a disused railway station in Colwich, Staffordshire, England. The former station is adjacent to Colwich Junction, where the Trent Valley Line to Stafford and the cut-off line to Stoke-on-Trent diverge. Authorisation for a railway line between Rugby and Stafford was obtained in 1845 by the Trent Valley Railway. By 1847, the Trent Valley Railway company had been incorporated in the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) and the line was opened. A station opened at Colwich in September of that year and, like most of the stations on the Trent Valley Railway, it was designed by the architect John William Livock.In 1849, the railway line between Stone and Colwich was opened by the North Staffordshire Railway (NSR). At Colwich, the LNWR and NSR agreed to own and operate the station jointly; a situation that remained until both railways became part of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923. Local passenger services over the former NSR route were withdrawn in 1947 and all other services were withdrawn from Colwich in 1958, when the station was closed.The former station house remains alongside the tracks and is now a Grade II listed building.

Colwich is a civil parish and village in Staffordshire, England. It is situated off the A51 road, about 3 miles (5 km) north-west of Rugeley and 7 miles (11 km) south-east of Stafford. It lies principally on the north-east bank of the River Trent, near Wolseley Bridge and just north of The Chase. The parish comprises about 2,862 hectares (28.62 km2) of land in the villages and hamlets of Colwich, Great Haywood, Little Haywood, Moreton, Bishton and Wolseley Bridge.

Colwich Junction is a rail junction near the village of Little Haywood, in the county of Staffordshire, England. It is the junction between two routes of the West Coast Main Line: the Trent Valley line and the Stone to Colwich cutoff line. The junction was the site of the 1986 Colwich rail crash.

Great Haywood is a village in central Staffordshire, England, just off the A51 and about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) northwest of Rugeley and 7.1 miles (11.4 km) southeast of the county town of Stafford. Population details taken at the 2011 census can be found under Colwich. Haywood lies on the River Trent, where the Trent is met by its tributary, the River Sow. The village is also the site of a significant junction of the English inland canal network, Haywood Junction, where the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal meets the Trent and Mersey Canal. The waters around the village are widely regarded by guidebooks as some of the most attractive on the network.There are two churches, each of which has an attached school. St. John's RC School was classed as 'Good' in their most recent Ofsted inspection, and Anson CE School was deemed to be 'Outstanding' in December 2011.St. Stephen's Church was designed by Thomas Trubshaw, and became the centre of a parish in 1854. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th Earl of Lichfield and other members of the Anson family of Shugborough Hall are buried in the churchyard of St Stephen's.St. John the Baptist's Catholic church was originally built in Tixall, about three miles (5 km) away, as a private chapel to Tixall Hall, which was owned by the Aston family. When the estate was sold to Earl Talbot, the church was dismantled and rebuilt with a few alterations in Great Haywood. The marks made on the blocks to allow reassembly can still be seen inside the church. There was originally a mill and a brewery in the village, but both have been closed down and demolished, commemorated by the names of the roads where they once stood (Mill Lane and Brewery Lane). Following a fatal automobile accident in 1905, the mill pond was drained and the road straightened. Samuel Peploe Wood (1827–1873) was an English sculptor and painter who was born in the village. He undertook work on many Staffordshire buildings, including the reredos at All Angels' Church, Colwich; corbels and bosses at St. Stephen's Church, Great Haywood and an oak lectern for Stowe by Lichfield. The Stone to Colwich railway line passes through Great Haywood, and the village was served by a railway station which was opened by the North Staffordshire Railway on 6 June 1887 and closed in 1957. The Great Haywood bypass opened 24 April 1964.In August 2002 advertisements were placed in the national press for a "hermit" to take up residence on the Great Haywood Cliffs above the nearby Shugborough estate, ancestral home of Lord Lichfield. Fifty-five people applied, and Ansuman Biswas was chosen as hermit. Shugborough also serves as the headquarters of Staffordshire's arts management team. The village was home to the newly married Edith Tolkien, wife of famous author J. R. R. Tolkien, from March 1916 to February 1917. She moved to the village to be close to his camp on Cannock Chase. J. R. R. Tolkien himself lived in Great Haywood in the winter of 1916–17.Great Haywood is the site of Essex Bridge, one of the largest surviving packhorse bridges in the country which stands over the River Trent near Shugborough Hall. It borders Cannock Chase, designated an area of outstanding natural beauty since 1958. Chaserider bus service 828 links Great Haywood with Stafford and Lichfield on an hourly basis 6 days a week. The former service 825 operated by Arriva ran 7 days a week up to half hourly.

Great Haywood railway station is a disused railway station in Staffordshire, England. The railway line between Stone and Colwich, England, was opened by the North Staffordshire Railway (NSR) in 1849 but a station to serve the village of Great Haywood was not opened until 1887. Although the line was a busy route for the NSR for traffic to and from Birmingham and the south; the amount of local traffic carried was low and passenger services were never intensive. Passenger services on the line were, as a wartime measure, reduced in 1941 to a single train per day from Stoke which had no corresponding return journey. In 1947 all stopping passenger services between Stone and Colwich were withdrawn and Great Haywood along with the neighbouring station, Hixon, closed.

Essex Bridge (grid reference SJ995225) is a Grade I listed packhorse bridge over the River Trent near Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England. Spanning the Trent 100 metres downstream of its confluence with the River Sow, it was built in the late sixteenth century by the Earl of Essex a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. The Earl lived nearby at Chartley Castle. It is now the longest remaining packhorse bridge in England with fourteen of its original forty round span arches left,: 129  and has been described as "perhaps the least altered old bridge in the county"The bridge carries the long-distance footpath The Staffordshire Way over the River Trent, linking the Trent and Mersey Canal tow-path with the bridleway through the Shugborough estate to Cannock Chase. The bridge is also a scheduled monument.

The River Sow is a tributary of the River Trent in Staffordshire, England, and is the river that flows through Stafford.

Haywood Junction (grid reference SJ994229), or Great Haywood Junction, is the name of the canal junction where the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal terminates and meets the Trent and Mersey Canal near to the village of Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England.

The Black Country Ring is a UK canal ring composed of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, Birmingham Main Line, Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, Coventry Canal and Trent and Mersey Canal.

Shugborough Hall is a stately home near Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England. The hall is situated on the edge of Cannock Chase, about 5.8 miles (9.3 km) east of Stafford and 4.7 miles (7.6 km) from Rugeley. The estate was owned by the Bishops of Lichfield until the dissolution of the monasteries, upon which it passed through several hands before being purchased in 1624 by William Anson, a local lawyer and ancestor of the Earls of Lichfield. The estate remained in the Anson family for three centuries. Following the death of the 4th Earl of Lichfield in 1960, the estate was allocated to the National Trust in lieu of death duties, and then immediately leased to Staffordshire County Council. Management of the estate was returned to the National Trust in 2016. It is open to the public and comprises the hall, museum, kitchen garden and a model farm.