Three spires rise from the flat land south of the Trent, and they belong to Lichfield Cathedral, the only medieval cathedral in England to have kept all three. Whittington is a village a few miles east of it, with a church, a green, old pubs and a barracks that has housed soldiers since the 1880s. The Staffordshire Regiment's museum is there, with a reconstructed First World War trench that schoolchildren walk through in awed silence.
Lichfield itself is a handsome cathedral city, and it produced Samuel Johnson, the writer of the first great English dictionary, who was born in a house on the market square that is now a museum. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and a remarkable scientist and poet in his own right, lived next to the cathedral close. The city is compact and easy to walk.
A few miles north, the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas is a vast, moving garden of memorials to the armed forces and the civilian services, with tens of thousands of trees planted in remembrance. It is free to enter and worth a quiet hour.
The canals meet near Whittington, where the Coventry Canal joins the Birmingham and Fazeley, and the towpaths make a peaceful walk among narrowboats and herons. Tamworth, to the south-east, has a Norman castle on a mound above the river, once a seat of the Mercian kings.
The riding is gentle Midlands fare, with A-roads, roundabouts and lanes through farmland. The A38 and A5 can be busy. Whittington itself has a pub or two; Lichfield, ten minutes away, covers fuel and food and has a market square ringed with cafés.