Biggin

The Waterloo Inn

The Waterloo Inn has stood on Main Street for more than two centuries, serving the farming village and travellers on the old turnpike road, and it remains the main reason to stop in Biggin. It is a traditional country pub with a large front-facing beer garden that looks out over farmland, an open fire for colder days, and a caravan and campsite round the back with hard standings, electric hook-ups and around twenty pitches. Under new ownership since November 2025, it does home-cooked food that reviewers describe as not overpriced.

The pies are the thing to know about. There are three, all homemade, all available gluten-free, including a cottage pie called "Napoleon's Retreat." There's also a game pie, a sausage of the week, a hot double spicy chicken burger, a beef and blue ciabatta, and farm-to-table lamb from Longditch Farm. Afterwards, Belgian waffle with ice cream, or apple crumble with custard. The real ales rotate — usually local, from Wincle, Peak Ales and Hartington. Dogs are welcome inside, and the staff often offer them treats. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "a cosy dog friendly village pub," which is about right.

Biggin Hall and the Dales

That's most of the commerce. Biggin is a small farming village on a limestone plateau over a thousand feet up, two miles southeast of Hartington and just off the A515, and it has no independent shops. The nearest food beyond the pub is Biggin Hall, a 17th-century house with a 1642 datestone, Grade II* listed, some of its stone-mullioned windows blocked in the 1790s to dodge the window tax. It now operates as a restaurant and holiday accommodation.

The reason to come here is what the ground does at the edge of the fields. Biggin Dale is a dry limestone dale — a stream only appears in its lower reaches — part of a National Nature Reserve and full of wildflowers in spring. A grassy track descends from Dale End to meet the River Dove at Wolfscote Dale. A circular of five or six miles links Biggin, Wolfscote and Beresford Dales, taking in high rocky cliffs, the Dove running between steep banks, and gentler tree-lined country beyond.

Cotton and The Compleat Angler

The fishing here has literary previous. Charles Cotton, the 17th-century poet, was born at nearby Beresford Hall and taught his friend Izaak Walton to fly-fish on the Dove; the river and its Pike Pool feature in Walton's *The Compleat Angler*.

Trails and Transport

You'll want a car. There is no station — the Ashbourne–Buxton railway closed, and its trackbed is now the Tissington Trail, thirteen flat, traffic-free miles for walking and cycling that pass 1.2 miles from the village. Buses along the A515 are limited. National Cycle Network routes 68 and 548 come through.

Newbiggin and the Sheep Trade

Biggin does not appear in Domesday because it did not yet exist; it was first recorded in 1223 as Newbiggin, "new building," when Cistercian monks ran a sheep ranch here. One outbuilding of the grange survives. The sheep stayed important for a long time: in October 1985 more than twenty thousand of them were entered at the autumn sales. Farming, as the parish still puts it, remains important to the village.