The Bridge Inn has banknotes stuck to its walls and antique fire-fighting equipment mounted where other pubs keep horse brasses. It's a two-roomed country pub at Calver Bridge, with a real fire and a beer garden that backs straight onto the River Derwent. Food runs Monday to Friday until eight, the Sunday roast has a reputation, and one reviewer called it "a lovely, dog-friendly pub with a great beer garden overlooking the River Derwent." The house beer is Bridge Best Bitter at 3.9%, with two rotating guests from breweries like Abbeydale, Thornbridge and Dancing Duck.
Up the hill sits its sister pub, the Derwentwater Arms, established 1708 and set high enough to look out over the surrounding edges. It leans on local and homegrown produce. One caution: in April 2025 the team running both pubs left "with heavy heart," with a search for new tenants underway, so it's worth checking who's behind the bar before you plan an evening around it.
The third pub, the Eyre Arms, is ivy-clad and named after the Eyre family, who owned manor houses in the area and are said to have lent Charlotte Brontë a surname for her heroine during a Derbyshire visit.
The Derbyshire Craft Centre at Calver Bridge has a shop, a gallery and the Eating House café, which does home-baked food and draws enough people that Christine Lowe's 1981 craft centre now counts among the Peak District's better-known attractions. Beyond it, in a former post office, the Calver Mill Gallery shows landscape paintings made with decorator's filler tools. At the other end of the village the Calver Sough crossroads has outdoor shops, a garden centre and a café; the old Heginbotham boot factory is now somewhere to buy walking boots rather than make them.
The flat riverside walk from Calver towards Froggatt is about two and a half miles, easy enough for a buggy, with daffodils and wild garlic along the banks in spring. It passes Calver Weir, built in the nineteenth century to power the mill, with the boulders of Curbar and Froggatt Edges in view on a clear day. If you want the height, the eight-mile circuit over Froggatt, Curbar and Baslow Edges takes three to four hours.
Grindleford station, on the Sheffield to Manchester line, is under an hour's walk. The A623 runs through, and the 257 bus reaches Calver Sough from Sheffield in about fifty-five minutes.
Calver has two faces. Calver Sough — pronounced "suff," after the drainage level dug to keep the old lead mines from flooding — is the busy crossroads on the A623. Main Road is the other: quiet, and, as Great British Life put it, notable for "its merciful quietude and complete absence of yellow lines."
The mill is the landmark. Calver Mill was built as a cotton mill in 1778, flooded and burned, rebuilt by 1804, and employed around 200 people by 1830. It became apartments after 1947. In the 1970s the BBC used it as Colditz Castle.
The cricket club keeps records going back to 1832, the year Princess Victoria is said to have watched a match and George Walton reputedly hit a ball clean off the field to Calver Cross. Before there were vans, the postmaster fetched the mail from Froggatt, a mile away, in a wheelbarrow.
