The village green has three metal animals chasing each other around a tree, installed as part of a £50,000 enhancement. It sits below a row of stone cottages lining the roadside, with Carsington Pasture rising steeply behind them to about a thousand feet. The valley is wooded, the pasture is bare, and the two things are close enough that you can walk from one to the other in an afternoon.
The Miners Arms is the only pub in the village, and it says so on its own signage. It's a family-run freehouse, owner-chef Douglas Bunting cooking alongside his wife Lillian and their daughter, and it sits directly on the Carsington Water circular path, which means most of its custom arrives on foot and slightly damp.
The food is unfussy and there's a lot of it. Homemade steak-and-stout pie, fresh fish with tartare sauce, ploughman's lunches, tapas plates. The Sunday roast is a sharing platter of three meats with all the trimmings, served across three afternoon sittings — a level of organisation that suggests they've learned to manage demand. There's a carvery on Sundays, Steak Night on Wednesdays and Fish and Chip Night on Fridays. Timothy Taylor Landlord is the regular ale, there are log fires and a beer garden, and an outdoor bar does cocktails, slushies and mocktails when the weather cooperates. Debbie Moorhouse, named as landlord in one write-up, summed the kitchen up plainly: "We serve great food, with a carvery on Sundays, a Steak Night on Wednesdays and a Fish and Chip Night on Fridays."
There are no shops in Carsington itself. For anything beyond the pub you head down to Carsington Water, about a mile south — cafes, the Mainsail restaurant, and a visitor centre with cycle hire, a climbing wall and an adventure playground.
The reservoir is the reason most people come. It's a 741-acre sheet of water, completed in 1992, which makes it younger than a good deal of the furniture in the pub. The full circular is about eight miles with several shorter loops off it, some flat enough for pushchairs, and there are bird hides along the way. For something harder, walk up onto Carsington Pasture, where a limestone boulder called the King's Chair sits among the pitted ground left by centuries of lead mining.
That lead mining is most of the village's history. The Romans worked it — inscribed lead ingots have been found nearby, and some archaeologists think this was Lutudarum, the administrative centre of the whole Roman operation. St Margaret's Church, Grade II* listed and largely 14th-century, has a west gallery the Gell family paid for in 1704 and a sundial reading "Re-edified 1648." Pevsner, characteristically, described it as "a nave and chancel in one."
Cromford station is about three miles off, Wirksworth two, and buses 110 and 111 run through on their way between Ashbourne and Matlock.
Just north, the wall at Hopton Hall zigzags in a series of curves — built wavy on purpose, for strength and sun — and fills with snowdrops every spring.
