Ellastone

The Pub That Came Back

The Duncombe Arms stood boarded up for years before Johnny and Laura Greenall bought it in 2012 and reopened a pub that has been part of Ellastone since 1850. It has since picked up a Michelin Bib Gourmand and an AA 2-Rosette, which is a lot of hardware for a building that was empty a decade ago.

The menu changes with the seasons - à la carte, a Market & Bar Menu, Sunday lunch set from 12 to 3, plus children's, gluten-free, vegan and pudding-and-cheese menus. The drinks list runs to 36 wines by the glass, 28 gins and 25 malt whiskies, alongside Marston's Pedigree and a house-brewed Duncombe Ale. Reviewers call the food difficult to fault, though one noted you're paying restaurant prices.

Dogs are welcome at the tables, and the ground-floor rooms in Walnut House open onto a garden for them. There are ten en-suite rooms, plus The Old Barn, self-catering for five or six, and Garden Cottage next door.

Old Stone and Open Paths

Across the road, a Grade II*-listed stone house called Ellastone Old House was once the Bromley Arms Inn. The village shop and post office closed in 2006 and nobody has reopened it, so the Duncombe Arms does most of the work now.

Church of St Peter has a west tower dated 1586, though something has stood on the site since at least 1163. Two of the bells, cast in 1502 and 1525, are older than the tower itself - thought to have come from Calwich Priory.

Walk out of the village and a circular route of five or six miles climbs into the Weaver Hills, foothills of the Pennines. The trig point at the top, known locally as The Walk, stands at 371 metres and gives you Alton Towers to the west and Derbyshire farmland to the east on a clear day. Ellastone also marks the southern end of the Limestone Way, 46 waymarked miles north to Castleton, and footpaths lead on to Calwich Park and the ruins of Calwich Abbey.

Abbey Echoes and Adam Bede

The abbey there, an Augustinian priory founded in 1148, was dissolved by 1532. George Frideric Handel was a repeat guest at the house that replaced it, and local legend - not record - credits the visits with inspiring the Messiah. What survives today is a stable block and a domed 1797 fishing house.

George Eliot based the village of Hayslope in Adam Bede on Ellastone. Her father, Robert Evans, worked here as a carpenter before the family built the biggest building business in the Ashbourne area, and Adam Bede Cottage, named for the connection, later served as Dr Covey's surgery.

Landscape, Literature and Remembrance

"This is unspoilt England wrote large," Countryfile said of the walking country around the village, "a charming rural outland where the countryside is as fresh and recognisable as if the novelist's ink had barely dried on the page."

Arthur Charlesworth of Calwich Bank Farm was killed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, the same day Captain Edward Unwin of Wootton Lodge won the Victoria Cross in the same battle. The Lodge now belongs to the Bamford family of JCB.

Getting Here and Village Life

The Swift bus runs roughly hourly on weekdays between Derby and Uttoxeter, stopping on Main Road; the nearest station is Uttoxeter. The playing field has a tennis club and the Ellastone & District Lawn Bowling Club.

At the last census, 300 people lived in Ellastone.