Bugsworth Basin sits at the bottom of the village, a spread of restored stone wharves and arms where narrowboats tie up on water that once carried limestone by the ton. It was the largest and busiest inland port on Britain's narrow-canal system, and the only one to survive intact. That is a strange sentence to write about a place this quiet, but the traffic stopped in the 1920s, the whole thing fell derelict, and volunteers spent from 1968 onwards putting it back together. It reopened officially in March 2005, when 94 narrowboats turned up to mark the occasion.
The basin is the reason to come, and the reason to walk. The towpath and old tramway make level, easy going around the water — good for picnics, wildlife and not much effort — and the path carries on along the Peak Forest Canal until it meets the River Goyt. If you want to earn your lunch instead, Eccles Pike goes up in zig-zags to a 370-metre summit with views out to Windgather Rocks, Combs Edge and Shining Tor. Longer circuits take in Cracken Edge above Chinley, or loop south through Whaley Bridge and back over fields.
There is a complication about lunch, though. The Navigation Inn, the 18th-century canal pub at the foot of the lane down to the basin, closed long-term in spring 2025 after years of decline, and nobody has taken on the lease. It did home-cooked food — chicken or chickpea curry with naan and mango chutney, sticky toffee pudding, treacle sponge — and kept two regular ales alongside changing beers from local micros. One former landlady was Pat Phoenix, better known as Elsie Tanner of Coronation Street. Later landlords, Janet Hiorns and her partner Roger, had their surname painted on a pub bench in the traditional canal "roses and castles" boat-art. For now the village has no open pub at all, so plan on Whaley Bridge, two miles off, or Chapel-en-le-Frith just beyond.
The other lost pub was the Rose & Crown, long demolished. In 1898 a man named John Cotton drank there, killed his wife at the basin, and became the last man hanged at Derby Gaol that year.
There are no shops to speak of; the place is small and mostly houses, arranged around the water. The Church of St James, built about 1874 in gritstone rubble with a slate roof banded in fish-scale tiles, seats 280 and still holds services. It stands in the conservation area, which is more than can be said for the pub.
The name is worth knowing. The village was Bugsworth until 16 April 1930, when the vicar and the school headmaster pushed through the change to Buxworth; a 1999 ballot voted 233 to 139 to keep it. The basin, stubbornly, kept the old spelling, so you arrive at Buxworth to visit Bugsworth. Locals still call the place "Buggy" regardless.
The cricket club has been going since around 1848, and produced Alan "Bud" Hill, who scored more than 12,000 first-class runs for Derbyshire. The football team, less grandly, are known as the Canal Men.
