The lattice-windowed cottages look down over a cotton mill and a weir, which tells you most of what you need to know about Cressbrook before you've parked. This is a mill village in the literal sense: it was built for the mill, by the people who ran it, and when the mill closed in 1971 the buildings simply became something else. The surviving Wye Mill, a Grade II* block put up in 1814–15, is flats now.
There is no pub in Cressbrook, and no shop. The village was a private estate of ex-mill cottages, and it has stayed residential. What it has instead is the water. The River Wye runs right past the mill through Water-cum-Jolly Dale, where a weir holds back a wide pool that reflects the wooded crags above it. A footbridge crosses the weir, funded by the British Mountaineering Council's Mend Our Mountains appeal, because the crags here are a serious sport-climbing venue — the Rubicon Wall is reputed to hold some of the hardest routes in the Peak.
For a pint you walk. The Monsal Head Hotel is about a mile away, overlooking Monsal Dale, and its Stable Bar has kept the original horse stalls — you sit where the horses stood, among the tack and hay racks, on a sloping flag floor. It pours cask ales from local micro-breweries, including one called Monsal Blonde, and keeps dog treats on the bar.
Two miles the other way, on Litton's green, is the Red Lion, three miners' cottages knocked into a coaching inn back in the 1700s. The kitchen, under head chef Ricky Adams, does oven-baked camembert, a homemade scotch egg, sautéed lamb's liver, and a sticky toffee pudding. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "one of the best Sunday roasts in Derbyshire... the biggest yorkie puds ever 10/10." The pub dog is Ula, who the village website says "welcomes well behaved owners."
The walking is the reason to stay. The Monsal Trail, a former railway line, runs flat and level straight past the mill — buggy-friendly, bike-friendly — through Cressbrook Tunnel and on to the Headstone Viaduct at Monsal Head. Cressbrook Dale, a narrow limestone valley in a National Nature Reserve, has an easy path along its floor and some of the best wildflowers in the Peak: lily-of-the-valley, ramsons, and in Tansley Dale orchids and the finest globeflower for miles.
The village grew after the Litton Inclosure Act of 1763, which is why there's no Domesday entry — Cressbrook didn't exist yet. The mill's early master was William Newton, a labouring-class poet from Eyam whom the writer Anna Seward dubbed "the Minstrel of the Peak." He treated his workers unusually well, which mattered: the mill up the road at Litton was notorious for the cruelty recorded in the memoir of one of its orphan apprentices. Bill Bryson stops at Cressbrook Mill in The Road to Little Dribbling.
Every June the village dresses its well with flowers, the old Derbyshire way, and for a place with no pub and no shop, a surprising number of people turn up to look.
