The Anglers Rest is a pub, a café and the village post office, all under one roof, and it is the last pub Bamford has left. When the previous owners looked like closing it in 2013, the newly formed Bamford Community Society raised the money to buy it — over 380 people chipping in, which made it the first community-owned pub in Derbyshire. You can still post a parcel and order a pint in the same visit.
The food is home-cooked pub cooking done properly. Reviewers single out the Sunday lunches — the pork and chicken roasts called "first class," a pheasant lunch that came with proper homemade Yorkshire pudding, real roast potatoes and fresh vegetables. There's a decent vegetarian selection, a beer garden, and local Peak District ales that often include Eyam and Intrepid. Dogs are welcome, and given who walks past the door, most of the customers arrive on foot or by bike. One Tripadvisor review title simply calls it "the best pub in the Hope Valley."
A little way toward the reservoir is the Yorkshire Bridge Inn, a family-run country inn with fourteen bedrooms that has been serving since at least 1826. It takes its name from an old packhorse bridge, the last crossing point on the Derwent before you reached the Yorkshire border. The bar keeps three regular and two changing beers, alongside Derbyshire gins, and the place is set up for walkers with dogs — there are dog welcome packs, and dogs are allowed in select rooms if you ask.
You are here for the ground more than the buildings. Bamford Edge rises directly above the village, a gritstone edge with a view across the Hope Valley and down onto Ladybower Reservoir that ranks among the most photographed in the Peak. Win Hill sits opposite at 463 metres. From the reservoir you can walk the waterside circuit past the dam wall and the overflow plugholes, or head north up the Upper Derwent to the dams where 617 Squadron practised their low-level runs before the raid of May 1943.
Ladybower itself is a drowned landscape. The reservoir was built between 1935 and 1943, and beneath it lie the villages of Ashopton and Derwent. The navvies who built the earlier Derwent and Howden dams lived in a temporary town called Birchinlee, known locally as Tin Town, which held up to 2,000 people and then vanished.
St John the Baptist's, built in 1860, is the only church in Derbyshire designed by William Butterfield, the architect of Keble College and the cathedral in Melbourne. It is slender, with a tall spire and a long airy chancel that is very slightly out of true, which makes it read as longer still. The Moore family who ran the cotton mill paid for it, and a descendant is still the church's patron.
The train helps. Bamford station sits on the Hope Valley Line, roughly hourly, about 22 minutes from Sheffield.
Every May the Recreation Ground — bought in 1925 by the people of Bamford and Thornhill by public subscription — hosts the sheepdog trials, with a fell race, sheep-shearing, and a competition for the best-conditioned dog.
