Ye Olde Gate Inne has a datestone reading 1616, and another reading 1874, both cut into the same building because it was altered in the second year and nobody wanted to lose the first. It is a three-roomed, little-altered country inn, Grade II* listed, and Roger Protz, who edits the Good Beer Guide, called it the best of the 500 in his book 500 Best Pubs. The Independent went further and named it the best unspoilt pub in the country. Local lore holds that the oak beams came from Spanish Armada ships and that highwaymen used the place, which you can believe or not.
It was a coaching inn on the turnpike, with stabling for the coachmen. Two changing cask ales are kept in proper cellars. The kitchen has moved with the times — za'atar popcorn, deep-fried oyster mushrooms with Chinese pancakes, an award-winning cheese and basil sausage on mash, a roasted cauliflower curry. Dogs are welcome and there's a spacious garden.
The other survivor is the Miners Arms, a traditional local at the centre of what was a lead-mining village. It's a long single room, divided partway by a fireplace: darts and a parquet floor at one end, carpeted dining at the other. Homemade pies, cakes, themed evenings, cask ales and flavoured gins. It once hosted the Barmote Court, the ancient court of the lead miners, along with the manor court.
There used to be more. Village memory records six pubs — the Thorn Tree, George and Dragon, Red Lion and Royal Oak are private houses now — and one local history claims fourteen at the height of the mining boom.
Brassington is built almost entirely of local limestone, set on a hillside of winding streets in a steep valley about 800 feet up. Most of the houses are two or three hundred years old. It sits just outside the Peak District boundary, sixteen miles north-west of Derby, on minor lanes off the A5023 corridor with buses to Ashbourne and Wirksworth; the nearest railheads are Cromford and Matlock, a short drive east.
The Church of St James is essentially Norman, with a squat Norman tower, round arches and vigorously carved capitals. Above the outer door there's a man's head that may be a Green Man, and inside a carved corbel of a mooning man or a devil, depending on who's looking. A gravestone in the churchyard reads: "As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you will be – Therefore, prepare to follow me."
The village shop is now a single post office and store, the last of a run that once included a butcher, baker, Co-op, cobbler, dressmaker and undertaker. In 2014 it got an automatic "Speedy Shop" vending unit, only the second in the UK.
The walking starts at the door. The High Peak Trail runs just north along an old railway trackbed, and Harboro' Rocks and Rainster Rocks rise out of countryside pocked with the humps and hollows of hundreds of abandoned mines, now full of wildflowers. Harboro' Cave has been occupied since the Ice Age.
The last mine, the Golconda, closed in 1953. Carsington Water is two miles down the road.
