Castleton

A Village Built Around Five Pubs

The George stands on Castle Street, opposite the church, in a building that dates from 1543. In 2025 it was crowned Best Sustainable Pub at the Great British Pub Awards, which in practice means John and Vicky Judson run a No Dig allotment on land near the pub, locals bring their surplus home-grown produce in exchange for pints, and the kitchen turns the gluts into jams, chutneys, sauces, sorbets, cider vinegar, flavoured liqueurs and chewy fruit leather. John makes goods to sell to visitors in a solar-powered workshop. The head chef is Ben Somerton, there are five cask beers on, and the pizzas are made in-house. It is one pub of five in a village of 544 people.

The other four are within a few minutes' walk, because Castleton is that kind of place: a small village at the western head of the Hope Valley, ringed by hills on three sides and doing a lot with the space. The Peakshole Water runs through the middle of it, a stream on its way to join the River Noe. To the south the ruins of Peveril Castle sit on a crag directly above the roofs. To the west the only road out climbs Winnats Pass, a steep limestone gorge whose name is a corruption of "wind gates," and it is the only westbound exit because the old A625 over Mam Tor slid off the hillside and was closed for good in 1979. The broken carriageway is still up there. Castleton sits right on the line where the gritstone Dark Peak to the north meets the limestone White Peak to the south, which is a geological way of saying the walking is very good in both directions.

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Inn, on How Lane, has the present building dating from 1660 and its licence from 1748. The names of every landlord since that year are written along the beams in the bar, so you can drink under two and a half centuries of predecessors. The speciality is homemade pies, and the one to order is the Inn Keeper Pie — steak, bacon, black pudding, potatoes and carrots under homemade gravy. There is also steak and ale, a creamy chicken and tarragon under a puff-pastry lid, lamb shanks, and a white chocolate cheesecake if you have room, which you won't. The ales run to Abbeydale Moonshine, Bradfield Farmers Ale and Peak Ales Chatsworth Gold. One reviewer got as far as "Best pub pie ever!!!" before running out of superlatives.

Coaching Inns and Tea-Room Tables

Ye Olde Nag's Head is a 17th-century coaching inn with nine letting rooms, some with antique four-poster beds and spa baths, and log fires across three reception rooms. All three areas are dog friendly. The kitchen does the Derbyshire Breakfast — sausage, smoked bacon, black pudding, free-range egg, grilled tomatoes, field mushrooms, baked beans and fried bread, available to take away if you have a hill to be up — and among the specials people remember an extra-large Yorkshire pudding filled with local bangers and mash, black pudding and onion gravy. The pub's own description of who it serves is worth quoting in full: "Everyone welcome; even muddy boots ~ campers, walkers, business people, coach parties, you name it, we welcome you all." A guest confirmed the dog was made to feel welcome and the muddy boots weren't an issue, which in this village counts as the whole point.

The Bull's Head, on Cross Street, is a Robinsons tied house that reopened after roughly half a million pounds of refurbishment — a new timber bar, open fires, an antler wall, rooms upstairs. It pours up to six Robinsons ales including Old Tom at 8.5%, keeps an A-to-Z of around twenty gins, and does fish and chips and steak with chunky chips and seasonal vegetables from local suppliers. The Castle, overlooked by its namesake, has stood for centuries, trades on its ghost stories, and keeps a freehouse range that has run to Sharp's Doom Bar, Marston's Pedigree and Greene King Old Speckled Hen.

The tea rooms are a genuine spread rather than an afterthought. Three Roofs Café sits on The Island in the centre, opposite the visitor centre, run by Carl Bracken and Lee Woolfe since 2011; the meats come from Hathersage Butchers and the free-range eggs from a few miles away, and breakfast runs until noon before the day switches to soups, roast-meat sandwiches and Bakewells. Peveril Tea Rooms on Castle Street, run by Lauren and Nate, take their coffee seriously enough to have a house blend called Peveril Perk roasted by Peak Bean, get their sausages and bacon from Watsons Farm Shop in Hope, their bread daily from a Chesterfield baker and their pasties from Bloomers of Bakewell. The dish to try there is the Derbyshire oatcake, a regional savoury oatcake, filled with ham, brie and cranberry, with a vegan version made to order. Down at the quieter Goosehill end, Dolly's Tearooms has been going since 1999 under Adam Stebel; a reviewer called the Aberdeen Angus steak sandwich "absolutely exceptional," and the hot roast pork comes with sage stuffing and apple sauce. Tilly's, on Cross Street, does all-day breakfasts and Eggs Royale.

Old Barns, Blue John and Open Hills

For dinner, Four Monkeys occupies a cruck barn built in 1530 — the number is where the restaurant's earlier name came from — originally a medieval tithe barn where farmers' contributions were collected and stored, still low-ceilinged and stone-walled. It opens Thursday to Sunday and the menu is deliberately small and made for sharing: a Chicken Shish Monkey Bowl, a Nasi Goreng, a Puttanesca, and a Devils Arse Pizza, which is a local joke that needs some explaining and gets it below.

The shops are split cleanly between people going up a hill and people buying a souvenir of one. Several outdoor shops kit out walkers along the narrow lanes. The other trade is Blue John, a banded purple-and-yellow fluorspar mined here in small quantities outside the tourist season and worked into jewellery — Castleton is one of the only places in the world it is found. ASD Jewellers has been cutting it since 1977, less than a mile from Treak Cliff Cavern; Harrison & Harrison and Blue John Gems are family shops in the village; and one jeweller trades out of a 17th-century tollhouse, which is the sort of address that comes as standard here.

The walking starts from the village centre without a car. Cave Dale is a dry limestone gorge — a collapsed cave roof, rocky and often wet underfoot — that climbs straight up behind the houses through what feels like a narrow alleyway, passing the gated mouth of Peak Cavern and giving the classic low view up to the castle. A short circuit of it is under three miles. The Winnats Pass loop, a similar length, runs up the gorge past Speedwell Cavern. The signature walk, about five and a half miles from the visitor centre, strings Cave Dale up onto open moor, over the summit of Mam Tor at 517 metres — the "Shivering Mountain," so called because its loose beds of shale and sandstone are permanently slipping, which is exactly why the road below it failed — then along the Great Ridge to Hollins Cross and back down through the bracken. From Hollins Cross you can drop the other way into Edale, the start of the Pennine Way at the foot of Kinder Scout, entirely on foot. On a clear day from the ridge there are glimpses of Manchester.

Routes for Every Pace and Four Caves

For anyone not up to the gorges, Castleton is a Miles Without Stiles hub, with three well-surfaced routes — a Peak Cavern walk, a Mam Tor landslip walk and a Ladybower one — laid out without stiles, steps or steep gradients, and the National Park's own Castleton family walk keeps to level pavement throughout. Peveril Castle is not among the accessible options: the approach from the top of Castle Street is steep, though it is a short climb to big valley views and one of England's earliest Norman fortresses. There is a stream in the village, too — from the Hope side, a marked path leads to a natural crater in the bed of the Peakshole Water where it deepens to three or four feet, with grass alongside for a picnic. There are no bins, so you take your litter home.

Then there are the caves, four of them, which turn a wet week into a busy one. Peak Cavern has the largest natural cave entrance in Britain and, for centuries, was known as the Devil's Arse; it changed its name officially in 1880 so as not to offend Queen Victoria, who came to watch a concert inside it. Up to forty families once lived in two rows of cottages in that cave mouth, with stables, an inn and three shops, making rope, until the last of them left in 1915. Speedwell Cavern began as a lead mine that a syndicate poured £14,000 into and never struck a decent vein; the flooded workings are now the underground boat ride to a chamber called the Bottomless Pit. Blue John Cavern and Treak Cliff Cavern both show the stone in the rock, and Treak Cliff — run by the Harrison family since 1945, when the landowner Colonel Broadbent offered them the lease — is one of only two working Blue John mines in the world, producing about half a ton a year.

From Domesday to Garland Day

The village and its castle were here before the record of them. Domesday, in 1086, lists it under William Peverel, and names the castle as Pechesers — the Peak's Arse, the same joke, older. There were three villagers, two ploughlands and eight acres of meadow, and the whole place was worth two pounds ten shillings to the lord, up from two pounds twenty years earlier. St Edmund's Church, on a mound inside the line of the medieval Town Ditch, has a Norman chevron chancel arch, box pews carved with the dates 1661 to 1676, and two mistranslated Bibles displayed near the pulpit: a "Vinegar Bible" that renders the Parable of the Vineyard as the Parable of the Vinegar, and a "Breeches Bible" in which Adam and Eve sew themselves breeches. The pew oil lamps were converted to electricity in 1964.

Every year on 29 May the village holds Garland Day, first recorded in the churchwardens' accounts of 1749, when eightpence was paid "for an iron rod to hang ye Ringers' Garland." A Garland King rides through the village in Stuart costume, buried to the waist in a bell-shaped frame of wildflowers three feet high and weighing about fifty-six pounds, followed by girls in white. The garland is hauled by rope up the church tower and impaled on a pinnacle to wilt. A small posy from the top of it, called the Queen, is carried to the war memorial and left there.