Alstonefield

The George, Past and Present

The George sits at one end of the village green, and it does not take reservations. You turn up, you get a table or you don't. In December 2023 it stopped being a high-end tasting-menu restaurant and went back to being a pub, and in 2025 it was sold to a private buyer and re-established as an independent free house under a landlord called Nick. The homemade pies and lasagne are the things to order — around twelve or thirteen pounds for a main — with sticky toffee pudding or apple crumble after. Muddy boots and paws are welcome, which in walking country is less a courtesy than a necessity.

The George has been here since about 1720, for most of that time the village's coaching inn: a wool market ran in its yard, and a livestock sale until roughly a century ago.

Hopedale and the Limestone Plateau

The other pub is the Watts Russell Arms, an eighteenth-century stone inn at Hopedale, within the parish. It serves a tapas-style menu — small, globally-inspired bites made to order, not Spanish — and usually Thornbridge beer, including Jaipur. It was the New Inn until the 1880s, when it took the name of James Watts-Russell of Ilam Hall, whose family had rebuilt the nearby village of Ilam in a Swiss-Alpine style.

Alstonefield stands on a limestone plateau about 900 feet up, over the Derbyshire border into Staffordshire, between the Dove and Manifold valleys. Stone houses cluster round the green and its mature trees. Great British Life once called it "a village full of vitality, enterprise and creativity."

Walking Down to Milldale

The walking is the main reason to come. A signed footpath drops steeply out of the village to Milldale and its bridge over the Dove, then follows the river for nearly three miles through Wolfscote Dale and Dovedale — about seven miles round, easy enough once you're past the first descent. Other routes head off toward Hall Dale, or to Hartington via Pilsbury. There's a car park with toilets on Lode Lane.

Milldale is worth the walk down. Its packhorse bridge — Viator's Bridge, early sixteenth century, two arches — was built without side walls so laden horses could pass; Izaak Walton had a character complain that a mouse could hardly get across it. There's a tearoom, Polly's Cottage, open Easter to October.

Church, Market and Transport History

St Peter's Church is Grade I listed, Norman at its core, its chancel arch and south door surviving from the twelfth century. It holds the largest collection of pre-Conquest carved stones in Staffordshire. In the churchyard is a memorial stone to Ann Green, who died on 11 April 1518 — believed to be the oldest legible gravestone in England.

The village was granted a market charter in 1308 and was once a sizeable market town, before the packhorse trade faded and the canal and railway engineers routed around the plateau, leaving it where it is. There is still no railway; the A515 runs two miles east, and Ashbourne about seven miles south.

Village Life Through the Year

St Peter's Day, the nearest weekend to the end of June, is the village's big day — sports and games on the playing field, where the cricket club plays through the summer. The rest of the year there's indoor bowls, a gardening club, pilates, and a parent-and-toddler group in the old school, which is now the village hall.