The car park behind the Barley Mow doubles as an arena. Each August it hosts the World Championship Hen Races, formalised in 1992, though locals will tell you the real origin is much older — farmers racing hens past a bucket for a penny. The rest of the year it is a car park.
The Barley Mow itself is a one-room free house on The Dale, packed with memorabilia and run by Colette and Mick. Colette sings for a funk and soul band called Mancuso and runs music nights. The Telegraph named it Best Pub in Derbyshire in 2025, and the kitchen does a steak and ale pie with buttery shortcrust and creamy mash, a "Luxury Boozy Beef Lasagne" made with red wine and pecorino, and a vegetarian lentil dish called "Dahl Darling." A UFO magazine once described it as the most likely place in the country to be abducted by aliens, and the pub has kept the line in its own publicity ever since.
That reputation is earned. Between October 2000 and October 2002, nineteen sightings were recorded locally, one of them a photograph of a circular object taken by Sharon Rowlands on 5 October 2000. Bonsall has been the self-appointed UFO capital of the Peak District since.
The other pub is the King's Head, up in the Market Place, established in 1677. It has low beams, Jacobean features, and an external mounting block by the door — the sort of detail that tells you how people used to arrive. Past landlords are listed on a notice behind the bar. It is family-run and popular with walkers.
There is a good deal to walk. Bonsall sits on the Limestone Way, at the head of its Matlock branch, and the Peak District Boundary Walk passes straight through. A circular from Cromford climbs past old mills and mine workings to hilltop views. The steep road up from the Via Gellia — the A5012 — is known to cyclists as the Col du Bonsall, which is the kind of name a hard climb attracts.
The village arranges itself around a stepped market cross in the sloping square, medieval in origin and set on thirteen circular stone steps. The ball on top was added in 1671. Bonsall applied for a market charter around three hundred years ago and was turned down, so the cross presides over a market that never came.
St James the Apostle's is Grade II* and reputed to have one of the highest chancels in England — seven steps up to it. At the base of a column in the north aisle sits the Bonsall Imp, a small carved figure also known as the Little Devil.
This was a lead-mining village, then a frame-knitting one; by the mid-nineteenth century it had more than 140 knitting frames turning out stockings and fine woollens. The mill down in the Via Gellia gave its name to Viyella, the fabric.
In 1866, workmen renovating a house uncovered twenty-nine horse skulls, every one missing its lower jaw. Nobody has ever explained them. Locally they are tied to a legendary battle up on Bonsall Moor, which is as good an answer as any.
