Blore

Broken Hands on a Windy Ridge

The alabaster effigies in St Bartholomew's have no hands. Roundheads knocked them off during the Civil War, and the intervening centuries of Sunday services have not put them back. William Bassett lies there in stone, with his wife Judith and their son-in-law Henry Howard, carved into a huge alabaster tomb by Jasper Hollemans some time between 1618 and 1640, in the north chapel of the church.

That is more or less the pattern with Blore: outsized monuments in an undersized place. The hamlet sits on high ground above Dovedale, between the Dove valley and the Weaver Hills, and by any reasonable measure there isn't much of it — Blore Hall, the church, the Old Rectory, a scatter of farms.

No Pub, but a Remarkable Church

There is no pub in Blore, and no shop. The nearest pint is down the steep lane at Ilam, or further round at Calton or Waterhouses.

What there is, is the church and the hall, and both are worth the climb up from Ilam. St Bartholomew's is Grade I listed, with Norman stonework surviving in the nave, a 14th-century tower, a 15th-century font and north aisle, and Jacobean box pews that have outlasted the family who paid for the Tudor screen beside them. It was restored in the 1990s and it shows, in the sense that nothing about the place feels precarious.

Hall, Manor and Name

Blore Hall is first documented in 1331, though the building standing today is early 16th-century and has changed little since 1661 — red brick in English bond, ashlar dressings, a limestone rubble wing added later. The Bassetts held the manor from the 15th century until 1618, when Elizabeth Bassett's marriage carried it into the Cavendish family and, a few generations further on, into the ancestry of the late Queen. The hall is no longer a family seat. It's run today by the Holiday Property Bond as holiday accommodation, which means people still sleep in it.

Domesday valued the whole manor at five shillings, with two villagers recorded to their names, putting it among the smallest fifth of settlements in the survey. The placename is thought to mean either "windy place" or "top of a hill." Standing on the ridge with the wind coming off the Weaver Hills, it isn't obvious which one they were being polite about.

Walking Above Dovedale

The walking makes the stronger case for staying nearby than the hamlet does on its own. The lane up from Ilam passes the Mary Watts-Russell Memorial Cross and climbs through Hinkley Wood to what the Country Images Magazine walking guide calls simply "the tiny hamlet of Blore," with the Weaver Hills opening up west across the Churnet Valley. Blore Pastures, a little further along, looks down over Ilam to Thorpe Cloud and Bunster Hill. A longer circuit takes in Mappleton, Okeover Hall and the Manifold Trail — six and a half miles, back down into Ilam for the pub you didn't have in Blore.

Ashbourne is under four miles by road, Alton Towers about a ten-minute drive. A bus, the 108, passes along the Ashbourne road roughly every four hours if you'd rather not walk it. Most people walk it.

Looking Out from Blore

There isn't much else to do once you're up there except look at the view — west to the Weaver Hills, east into the Peak District — and go back down for your dinner.