The "Izaak Walton" public house and restaurant is named after the seventeenth-century fisherman Izaak Walton, whose book The Compleat Angler is still in publication today.

Walton was born in Stafford, and legend has it that he fished in the River Blithe, which is near the pub.

During the English Civil War Staffordshire saw a great deal of conflict.

The local manor house Paynsley Hall was first held for Charles I, then garrisoned by Parliamentarian forces before being destroyed.

After the Reformation part of the population worshipped not in the local parish church at Draycott in the Moors, but in a private chapel at Paynsley Hall, whose owners, the Draycot family, remained faithful to the old religion.