Description:The village is situated on the edge of a dale in the Staffordshire Moorlands. In 1932 Cotton and Oakamoor became a separate ecclesiastical parish, although for centuries previously Cotton had been part of the ancient parish of Alton. In the early 1800s the first English religious house belonging to the Congregation of the Oratory opened at Cotton, with John Henry Newman as superior. The village further established its reputation as a Catholic tronghold within the county, when in 1873 a leading Catholic boys school with pupils from all over the country moved here from Sedgley Park, near Wolverhampton, where it had been since its foundation by Bishop Challoner in 1763. The school, named originally as "St Wilfrid's College, Cotton" untill the mid 1900s, when it was renamed "Cotton College", was moved into the building previously occupied by the Gilbert family, (Thomas Gilbert being an MP noted for his Poor Law reforms and work with the noted canal designer James Brindley (whose experimental canal workings are still extant today) and (for 3 years) the Earl of Shrewsbury. The school closed in 1987 and is
now in a derelict state, although the parish church of Saint Wilfrid (also designed by AWN Pugin- more famous perhaps for the Houses of Parliament) around 1844 remains in use in Cotton today .
Cotton Dell is an area of woodland, 160 acres of which was purchased by the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust in late 1999. The most notable rock feature in the Dell is Bill's Rock. It is part of local legend having been the scene of a tragedy in the sixteenth century. The daughter of a local landowner, who had been promised in marriage to a local squire, fell in love with a farm worker. The girl's father and the squire accompanied by hounds chased the couple into the Dell. When the lovers reached Bill's Rock they jumped off to their deaths, while the hounds supposedly
attacked their pursuers. Another version talks of a certain "Colonel Bill" who, after a night of excess at the local Star Inn in Cotton, chased a fox to his death over rocks into the brook below.