The Yew Tree Inn, Cauldon

Behind a plain stone front between Cauldon's church and the quarry hills waits one of the most extraordinary pub interiors in Britain. The Yew Tree is some three centuries old and filled to its rafters with the late landlord Alan East's lifetime of collecting: towering Victorian Polyphon music machines that still play for a coin, pianolas, penny-farthings, grandfather clocks and ancient carved settles, all crowded beneath low beams. Regulars call it an Aladdin's cave and the description undersells it. The pub carries on today in the same unhurried, gently eccentric spirit — real ale, no fuss, and a corner of the Staffordshire Moorlands where time has agreeably lost its way.

One of the most singular pub interiors in Britain, independently run in a rural moorlands hamlet — nobody stumbles on the Yew Tree without telling everyone they know.

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