Above Main Street, cut into the gritstone, there is an armchair. There are also thrones, altars, carved steps, tunnels and cup-and-ring markings, all worked into the outcrop known as Rowtor Rocks by the Rev. Thomas Eyre around 1700. Eyre was the parson and a reputed Druid, and he wrote his sermons sitting up here among the rocks. A rocking stone weighing about fifty tons balanced at the eastern edge until some young people dislodged it on Whit Sunday, 1799. It has not rocked since.
Birchover is a small hillside village on a ridge whose name means "overgrown with birch trees," on the edge of Stanton Moor between Matlock and Bakewell. The rocks are the thing here. Rowtor, the Andle Stone, the Cork Stone with its footholds and metal handles for climbing — the landscape is defined by weathered lumps of gritstone that people have been carving, climbing and telling stories about for a very long time.
For a village of 362 people it has two pubs, both of which brew their own beer.
The Druid Inn sits directly below Rowtor Rocks and takes its walking clientele seriously. At lunchtime there's a Walkers Menu of fresh cobs, home-made soups, pastries and sausage rolls; later the kitchen does terrine of ham hock, black pudding and Hartington Stilton with piccalilli, and a steak, kidney and potato pie cooked with Druid Ale. The house beer is Druid's Drop, a smooth malty bitter brewed for the pub by Peak Ales. Dogs get water and treats.
The Red Lion, built in 1680, was a farm and alehouse before it was first licensed in 1722. There is a well in the bar, reported to be thirty feet deep, that once supplied spring water for brewing. Matteo and Alyson have run it since 2006. Matteo cooks — pub classics with a Sardinian slant, plus Sardinian Nights and tapas evenings — and also makes cheese, and brews the Birchover Brewery ales on site. Those, the pub will tell you, can be had "here and nowhere else." Muddy boots and waggy-tailed dogs are welcome in the tap room.
The main walk is the Birchover and Stanton Moor circular, about four and a half miles. It starts near the Red Lion, passes Rowtor Rocks, climbs through Uppertown onto the bracken moor and takes in the Earl Grey Tower and the Nine Ladies, a Bronze Age stone circle. Local legend says the Nine Ladies danced here on the Sabbath and were turned to stone, along with the fiddler who stands nearby. Robin Hood's Stride and a hermit's cave lie within walking distance to the west.
St Michael's, below the rocks, was built around 1700 as the private chapel for Thomas Eyre's Rowtor estate and is now the parish church. The original village stood half a mile up the hill at Uppertown until it outgrew its water supply and moved down; the Norman church up there is gone, its stones scattered into local walls.
Matlock station is about five miles off on the Derwent Valley Line, and the 172 bus runs Bakewell to Matlock via Winster and Elton. Otherwise the road is the B5056, off between Ashbourne and Bakewell.
The farm scenes in The Princess Bride were filmed on Bradley Rocks, just outside the village. Nobody makes much of it.
