On the Crescent, set into the wall opposite the great Georgian curve of the building, there is a well where the water comes out of the ground at a steady 27 degrees and has done for as long as anyone has measured it. People still fill bottles from it. You will see them at it most days — a five-litre container held under the spout, someone waiting their turn, the whole transaction free and faintly ceremonial. The Romans built a bath here for the same water. So did the Georgians. The water has outlasted both.
Buxton is England's highest market town, sitting at around a thousand feet in a bowl of the Peak District, ringed by hills with Grin Low rising to the south. Arriving from Manchester on the A6 you drop down into it, and the stone changes as you go — honey-coloured limestone, the sweep of the Crescent, the domed former hospital, and twenty-three acres of gardens with the River Wye running through them. It is Georgian and Victorian and built to be looked at. The town knows this about itself.
The pubs are good and there are a lot of them. The Cheshire Cheese, at 37–39 High Street, is the eighth pub in the Titanic Brewery fleet — a double-fronted, Grade II-listed building with two log-burning fires and ten handpulls on the bar. The food runs from fish and chips to Sunday lunch, sourced locally. A few doors along, the Old Sun Inn at number 33 is a 17th-century coaching inn, the second-oldest building in town, with stone floors, oak panelling and six handpumps carrying local ales from Thornbridge, Wincle and Bradfield. It is known for its homemade pies. The sign says muddy boots allowed, which in a walking town is less a courtesy than a business decision.
Behind the Crescent, on George Street, the Buxton Brewery Tap House occupies the old Court House, a Grade II-listed building from the mid-1800s with a vaulted cellar bar in the basement. Buxton Brewery started in 2009, mashed in on a cold January morning in a family garage at forty litres a batch; it now brews thousands of litres at a time and has made an 11% peanut butter and biscuit imperial stout called Yellow Belly with a brewery in Sweden. The Tap House itself serves only crisps. For anything more it sends you round the corner to the Cavendish Kitchen, which makes wood-fired pizzas to order. Dogs get water bowls and treats.
Elsewhere the town covers most of what a pub can be. The Railway, near the station, has a large beer garden. RedWillow is a craft bar where dogs are welcome on a lead but not on the furniture. Lubens pours local cask ales and does seasonal food, open daily from late morning.
The eating is more ambitious than a town this size needs to be. Santiago, a Spanish tapas bar and deli in the Old Pump House on George Street, is run by a local family — James and Sandra Tobias and their daughter Harriet — who developed the habit over twenty-odd years of holidays and a second home in Spain. The menu runs to crab croquettes, wafer-thin León air-dried beef shaved over sheep's cheese, and Secreto Iberico pork with its small seam of intensely flavoured crispy fat. Fischer's at Baslow Hall, a Michelin star about twenty minutes away, and Restaurant Lovage in Bakewell, run by the Great British Menu finalist Lee Smith, are the area's fine-dining flags if you want to make a night of it.
Up in Higher Buxton, the Pig & Pepper bakery has been going since 2017, run by Aran and Laura Cheatle. Laura trained through a microbakery course before they opened. They bake sourdough and rye and focaccia and Irish soda bread, and a thing they have trademarked called the Croissage Roll — a sausage roll in croissant pastry — which won a star at the Great Taste Awards; the Irish soda bread with treacle and honey won two. Laura also runs a bread school out of the shop, teaching on domestic ovens rather than commercial ones on the grounds that that is what people actually cook on at home.
There is a local pudding, too. The Buxton Pudding is a Derbyshire thing — shortcrust pastry, jam, and a sponge top made with breadcrumbs, which is what separates it from a Bakewell tart's ground almonds. It was first recorded at a Mayor of Derby's dinner in 1868, went quiet for a century, and was revived in 2012 by Dom McCall and Alan Hibbert, who were running a Buxton coffee shop when a friend's mother handed them an old recipe and asked them to try it. They now sell it as the Buxton Pudding Emporium. In the Cavendish Arcade — the restored Victorian thermal baths — Charlotte's Chocolates makes most of its stock on the premises behind a viewing window, and pours hot chocolate made with real Belgian chocolate.
For breakfast there is Blossom Cafe on Scarsdale Place, where the staff bring water bowls for dogs and where a reviewer once got two large English breakfasts and hot drinks for under twenty pounds. No.6 The Square does homemade cakes and afternoon tea opposite the Opera House, and the Arcade Deli has a terrace looking out over the Slopes.
The walking starts at the front door. The classic short one climbs from the Pavilion Gardens past the boating lake, up to Poole's Cavern, and on through woodland to Solomon's Temple — a small Victorian folly on Grin Low that gives you a 360-degree view of the town and the moors, as far as Kinder Scout and Mam Tor on a clear day. It is about five kilometres round. The folly stands on a Bronze Age barrow that was dug up during its construction in the 1890s, and it replaced an earlier tower put up by a local farmer called Solomon Mycock, which is where the name comes from. The Serpentine Walk follows the Wye out of the gardens with benches along it, for anyone who wants the river without the hill.
Further out, the Monsal Trail runs traffic-free along a former railway line east of town — flat, well-surfaced and family-friendly, through tunnels reopened in 2011. Off it, at Chee Dale, thirty-odd flat limestone boulders are laid along the base of a cliff at the foot of the gorge: stepping stones that run alongside the river rather than across it, and go underwater after heavy rain. To the north-west the Goyt Valley has reservoir loops and the ruins of Errwood Hall, a Manchester businessman's house demolished in 1934 for the reservoir works; the azaleas and rhododendrons the family planted still flower in June, above the water that now covers their farmland. And for a proper hill day there is Chrome Hill, a jagged limestone reef knoll — fossilised coral, 340 million years old — known as the Dragon's Back for the stegosaurus spine of its ridge.
South-west of town, Axe Edge Moor is the source of five rivers: the Dove, Manifold, Dane, Wye and Goyt all rise on it. The road across it, the A537 to Macclesfield, is repeatedly rated the most dangerous in Britain.
For a week with children, Poole's Cavern is the reliable draw — a two-million-year-old show cave with guided tours every twenty minutes, paved and handrailed throughout, and a story for every age group, from Stone Age hunters to a medieval outlaw called Poole to Mary, Queen of Scots. Buggies are allowed inside. Above it, one of the highest Go Ape courses in the country runs zip wires through the trees, minimum age ten. And the Pavilion Gardens will fill a low-effort afternoon on their own — a miniature railway at £2.50 a head, pedalo swan boats on the lake, play parks and a bandstand.
The history is unusually deep for a place that never made it into the Domesday Book. The surveyors reached the Peak and recorded most of it as waste, nothing worth taxing. But the springs were known long before that. The Romans called the settlement Aquae Arnemetiae, after a local goddess, and built a bath at the main thermal spring; when a swimming-pool floor was lifted in 1975 during reconstruction, workers found a votive deposit in a fissure beside the spring — 232 Roman coins, three bronze bracelets and a wire clasp, dropped in as offerings across three and a half centuries, the earliest from the reign of Claudius. They are in the town museum now.
In 1572 Bess of Hardwick and her husband George Talbot, the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, built a fortified four-storey tower here as purpose-built lodging for people taking the waters. Mary, Queen of Scots stayed in it on eight occasions through the 1570s and 80s, in the Earl's custody on Elizabeth I's orders, coming for the waters between spells of house arrest. A couplet attributed to her is said to have been scratched on a window pane: "Buxton, whose warm waters have made thy name famous, perchance I shall visit thee no more — Farewell." The tower survives as the core of the Old Hall Hotel, which claims to be the oldest hotel in England.
The town you see now is mostly Georgian and Victorian ambition. The Crescent — a curved sweep of hotel, lodging houses and assembly room — was built between 1780 and 1788 for the 5th Duke of Devonshire, opposite St Ann's Well, by the architect John Carr. Carr also built the Duke's Great Stables nearby, an octagonal building for up to 120 horses. In 1881 it became the Devonshire Royal Hospital, and in 1859 a local architect, Robert Rippon Duke, roofed its courtyard with what was then the largest unsupported dome in the world — 44 metres across, wider than the Pantheon and St Paul's. It is a University of Derby campus now. The hospital was the last of England's hydropathic establishments to close, in 2000.
The Opera House, built in 1903 by Frank Matcham — the architect behind the London Palladium and some hundred and fifty other theatres — hosts the Buxton International Festival every summer, opera and music and a literary series, with a Fringe running alongside it.
Buxton has produced and housed an odd mix of people. Vera Brittain, who wrote Testament of Youth, lived here from 1905 and nursed at the Devonshire Hospital during the First World War; she found the town suffocating, left as soon as she could, and later poured her dislike of its social snobbery into her writing. A plaque marks her home on Park Road. Her daughter was the politician Shirley Williams. Tim Brooke-Taylor of the Goodies was born here, and so was the singer Lloyd Cole.
The station sits in the town centre, the terminus of the line to Stockport and Manchester Piccadilly — about an hour, roughly thirty trains a day. From there the buses fan out into the National Park: the 442 to Ashbourne through the White Peak limestone villages, the 62 to Castleton and the Hope Valley, the 65 to Sheffield through Tideswell and the plague village of Eyam. Bakewell is twenty minutes by road, Chatsworth twenty-five.
Each summer the town dresses three of its wells with flowers pressed into clay, a custom that began in 1840 as thanks to the 6th Duke for piping fresh water to the market place. The Market Place well and St Ann's Well are done by volunteers. The third, in Spring Gardens, is left to the pupils of the community school — one well of their own to fill, petal by petal.
