The Old Hall Inn keeps seven or eight cask ales on at a time, and once a year it runs a three-day beer festival that has grown to 140 beers and ciders — one weekend drew 2,500 people. It stands at Whitehough, a short walk from the centre of Chinley, a 16th-century inn with eight bedrooms and a restaurant that runs through into the neighbouring Elizabethan manor house along a minstrels' gallery. The food is seasonal and local: hearty classics and Sunday roasts alongside more careful small plates. Dogs are welcome in the snug and tap rooms by the bar, and the landlord, Daniel Capper, used to be a business consultant. Its sister pub, the Paper Mill Inn, does hand-stretched, wood-fired pizza.
Chinley itself sits on a flat valley floor with hills rising to the north. Its centre is a parade of independent shops under carefully restored arcades — a post office, a newsagents, a launderette, a deli, an Indian restaurant, a hairdressing salon, a pharmacy, a general store, and a hypnotherapist's. That is a good range of trades for a village this size.
The walking starts more or less at the door. Cracken Edge rises above the village in rust-coloured crags, the remains of gritstone quarries that produced flagstones and roofing slate until they closed around 1900. A longer circuit takes in Mount Famine and South Head, three summits on the Pennine Bridleway, past a green sign pointing "Edale via Kinder Valley." You can also walk station to station over the moors to Edale, above the tunnel the train runs through underneath.
Up at Chinley Head there is a stark stone house called Peep-O-Day, named because it faces east and catches the first morning sun.
At Chapel Milton, sandwiched between two railway viaducts, stands the Chinley Independent Chapel, built in 1711 from coursed gritstone. Its congregation traces back to 1662, when the Rev. William Bagshawe — the Apostle of the Peak — was ejected from the church and took to preaching from a converted barn at Malcoffe Farm. A Great British Life feature called the chapel "a singularly beautiful building."
Chinley barely existed before the railway. It grew from a scatter of isolated farms once known as Four Lane Ends, and became a village when the line arrived in 1867 and made the place a junction of two main lines. Passenger numbers climbed from 11,000 in 1892 to 67,000 by 1922. The direct London line closed in 1968, but the station is still in the village, on the Hope Valley line, ten minutes' walk from the Old Hall Inn, with Buxton five miles south and Manchester fifteen.
Five minutes away at Buxworth is Bugsworth Basin, the terminus of the Peak Forest Canal and once "the largest and busiest inland port on Britain's narrow canal system and the only one to survive intact." Around seventy boats left it a day at its peak. Buxworth was Bugsworth until 1930, when the schoolmaster and the vicar renamed it as "less ugly"; a referendum in 2000 declined to change it back, and locals still call it Buggy.
Mabel Bamford, who wrote and illustrated the village's history, played tennis into her nineties.
