The Beeley Inn sits on Devonshire Square, an 18th-century stone building with flagstone floors, original beams, inglenook fireplaces and wood-burners. It was the Devonshire Arms until fairly recently. The kitchen, under head chef Lewis Thornhill, builds a seasonal menu around ingredients from the Chatsworth estate; à la carte mains run to about £30, and there's a separate pub-classics menu alongside Sunday lunch. Over twenty gins, regional cask ales, fine wines. It holds an AA Rosette and a Michelin Guide listing, which is a lot of accolade for a village this size. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the Malt Vault, with water bowls provided. There's a terrace-garden out the back and a brasserie with large windows over the village and the stream.
That stream runs through the middle of everything. Beeley is a small stone estate village — pretty cottages on winding lanes, largely unaltered — and the unaltered part is not an accident. It was one of four villages built to house Chatsworth estate workers, along with Edensor, Pilsley and Calton Lees, which is why it looks the way it does.
The village stayed independent of the estate until 1747, when the 3rd Duke of Devonshire bought Beeley Hill Top. The 4th and 6th Dukes bought up the rest over the following century.
Above it rises Beeley Moor, gritstone upland reaching 371 metres, remote and heather-clad in summer. The gritstone from up here built Chatsworth House; coal pits and quarries on the moor once fuelled domestic hearths and the lead-smelting furnaces of Norman's mill.
The walking starts more or less at the door. The Chatsworth and Beeley circular runs from Calton Lees car park along quiet riverside paths, crosses stepping stones over Beeley Brook — tricky after heavy rain — and climbs above a wooded gorge through Hell Bank Plantation, past several waterfalls, with the option to call at Chatsworth House on the way round. The Peak District Boundary Walk passes through the village too.
For food shopping there's a village café, and the Chatsworth Farm Shop at Pilsley is about eight minutes away by car.
The Church of St Anne was founded around 1150 and keeps its Norman south doorway and a priest's door dated to roughly 1292. Pevsner gives it four lines, noting the Norman door and a "much renewed" 13th-century chancel. Memorials to the Cavendishes — the Dukes of Devonshire — are inside.
Domesday recorded the place in 1086 as Bewlag: three villagers, five smallholders, one plough team, an acre of meadow. Eight households, which put it in the smallest 40 percent of settlements in the survey. The tenant-in-chief was King William.
Rowsley South, on the Peak Rail heritage line, is a five-minute drive; Matlock is the nearest mainline station, with Peak Rail covering the four miles between. The B6012 runs through the village, and Chatsworth House is about 2.6 miles up the road.
Up on the moor there's Hob Hurst's House, a rare square Bronze Age burial barrow, free to visit and in the care of English Heritage. It is named after Hob o' th' Hurst, a mischievous goblin said to live in the nearby woods.
