Two rivers meet at Alport. The Lathkill comes down its dale from the north and the Bradford runs in from Youlgreave, and they join in the middle of the hamlet before flowing east towards the Wye and the Derwent. Both are limestone-clear — you can count the stones on the bottom — and the sound of them is the loudest thing here.
The Bradford is little over four miles long. The Haddon Estate owns and manages it, as it owns most of Alport, which has belonged to the Duke of Rutland for generations.
Cross the water and you have a choice of bridges. The road bridge over the Lathkill dates from 1750 and is Grade II listed. Narrower and older is the single-arch packhorse bridge over the Bradford — limestone rubble with gritstone copings, a span of about eleven and a half feet, which is enough for one pony at a time. Further downstream in Bradford Dale there is a clapper bridge older than either.
The walking is the reason to be here. From the doorstep you can follow the Bradford upstream to Youlgreave or the Lathkill north to Conksbury, both gentle riverside meadow walks. For something longer, the Bradford Dale and Lathkill Dale circular runs between five and nearly nine miles depending on how you cut it, over paved lanes and rougher riverside paths that turn muddy when wet. One writer called it among the finest in the Peak National Park. Up the Lathkill towards Monyash is a five-mile route into a steep-sided limestone valley, and along the way the rivers hold brown trout, white-clawed crayfish, dippers and kingfishers. Bradford Dale also grows Jacob's Ladder, a rare wild plant.
There is no pub. There was one — the Three Rivers Inn, Alport's only pub, which closed in 1924 and was demolished in 1937 to widen the road that now climbs towards the A6 and Buxton. Nothing has replaced it. For a pint you walk the mile to Youlgreave, where the George Hotel and the Bull's Head are, along with the shop, the post office and the fish and chips.
Youlgreave also has one of the best family swimming spots in the Peak District — a natural pool on the Bradford with built-up edges, popular for wild swimming and paddling.
The quiet is deceptive. Three hundred years ago Alport was an industrial centre with a lead-smelting mill, a paper mill, and sheds for weaving, dyeing and bleaching wool. The Alport Cupola lead smelter went up around 1840 and its stubby chimney still stands on the hillside; the smelting works closed around 1890. To drain the mines, the Hillcarr Sough was driven — four and a half miles of tunnel finished in 1787, reputed the largest ever dug in the country. All of it gone now, or ruined.
The disused stone corn mill by the river is 18th century, though a mill was documented here in 1159. It appeared in the 1970 film of D.H. Lawrence's *The Virgin and the Gypsy*.
The Victorian travel writer James Croston called Alport, with its neighbours, one of the "hidden gems in the crown of a regal landscape." Monks Hall, the oldest house in the hamlet, still stands where a stream cascades down to the Bradford, which is where it has always gone.
