The Barrel Inn sits on a table of land some 1,300 feet up, which makes it, by its own account, the highest pub in Derbyshire. On a clear day the beer garden looks out over five counties. Most days it looks out over the Hope Valley, which is enough.
It is also, more or less, the whole village. Bretton is a hamlet of about five properties on a gritstone ridge, with no shop, no church, and one commercial premises — the pub. For anything else you go to Eyam or Great Hucklow, down the narrow lanes off the B6465.
A dwelling has stood on the Barrel's site for over 400 years. The building dates to 1597, began as a thatched farmhouse, and has been licensed since 1753, when George Bowman took it on as the first recorded landlord. The thatch is now stone slate. Inside there are stone-flag floors, oak beams, low doorways, nail-studded doors, thick limestone walls and log fires. Di and Phil Cone have run it for 26 years.
The kitchen does steak and ale pie, pan-fried liver and onions, cod loin, fish and chips, toad-in-the-hole, and a forager's pie for vegetarians, with Sunday roasts served noon to five. Reviewers call the prices higher than average and the food worth it. The real ales are well kept and the brands rotate. Dogs, it should be said, are not welcome — guide dogs only.
The pub's name may have nothing to do with beer barrels. One account traces it to a barrel-shaped underground cavern in the Hucklow Edge lead vein, which is the kind of detail a village this small tends to hold on to.
Lead mining shaped the place. Miners and their families lived here, and Ladywash Mine worked away to the east until 1979. The miners once ran a burial club out of the inn that required two weeks' notice of a death before it would pay out. The rule was so strict there were never any claims, so the fund was spent on an annual Christmas party instead.
In January 1947 the snow drifted twenty feet over the windows and cut the inn off for two or three weeks. The publican Stanley Drewett and his wife sat it out. An eyewitness said the building looked like a "huge igloo."
The walking is the reason most people come. The Bretton Clough circular runs about five miles from the pub door, down through wooded valleys to Stoke Ford where two cloughs meet, with two steep climbs and distant views to Mam Tor and Stanage Edge. In the clough itself are the ruins of five deserted homesteads, including 17th-century Gotheredge Farm. Gliders from the Hucklow club, going since 1935, circle the thermals overhead.
Grindleford station, on the Sheffield–Manchester line, is a few miles east; Bakewell is fifteen or twenty minutes south. There is no bus.
In 1745 the farmers of Eyam drove their cattle up into Bretton Clough to hide them from Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highlanders. It is still quiet enough up there that you can see why they chose it.
