The clock on St Anne's tower reads VICTORIA 1897 instead of the numbers you'd expect, spelled out in Roman letters across the east face. Dr Edward Mason Wrench gave it to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and it has been telling the wrong sort of time ever since. Inside the same church there's a whip once used by the parish dog whipper, kept as if someone might need it again.
Baslow sits at the northern gate of Chatsworth Park, a mile or so above the great house, with the River Derwent running through the middle of it. Three hamlets — Bridge End, Over End and Nether End — spent centuries being separate places before agreeing, around the 1920s, to be one.
Most of the eating happens at Nether End, around Goose Green. The Devonshire Arms started life as the Barrel Inn in 1829 and does the sort of menu where a grass-fed 28-day sirloin costs £34 and beer-battered fish and chips £19.50, with breakfast from half past eight — Full English, Derbyshire oatcakes, American pancakes. If you want the version with the beer garden, the Wheatsheaf is up the road in an 18th-century coach house, dog-friendly, grills its speciality, and serves food every day until late.
The Cavendish Hotel is the grand one. It was the Peacock Inn on Cock Hill, a coaching stop on the turnpike between Chesterfield and Buxton, until the Chatsworth Estate bought it in the 1830s and rebuilt it as The Cavendish in the 1970s. Deborah Mitford, then Duchess of Devonshire, opened it. A £3.5m restoration hung it with art and artefacts from Chatsworth.
Around Goose Green there are tea rooms and small shops by the packhorse bridge, and a five-minute drive to Pilsley gets you the Chatsworth Farm Shop. The green itself doubles as the main car park, which is the arrangement Baslow has settled on.
The walking is why a lot of people come. From the village the Three Monuments Walk climbs to Nelson's Monument, a gritstone obelisk, and the Three Ships rocks on Birchen Edge — three boulders carved "Soverin," "Defiant" and "Victory." Up on Baslow Edge stands the Eagle Stone, an isolated six-metre block that young men were once expected to climb before they were allowed to marry. Nearby is Wellington's Monument, put up in 1866 by that same Dr Wrench as a balance to Nelson's. He'd served in the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny with the 12th Lancers before taking over the village medical practice, and evidently liked the idea of both admirals and generals being represented on the moor.
Baslow Old Bridge dates from 1608 and is the oldest crossing of the Derwent never carried off by a flood. At its north-west end is a small gabled watchman's hut, built around 1603, once a toll booth. It is about the size of a garden shed.
The Domesday surveyors found eighteen villagers here in 1086, four plough teams, a mill worth a shilling. Grindleford station is five miles off, the 84 bus getting you there in twelve minutes; the A619 and A623 meet in the village.
Behind the sports field there's a zip wire, a wooden obstacle course and swings, and on summer afternoons the cricket club is out on the green, three teams of them, playing on.
