Curbar

The Riverside Inn and the Edges

The Bridge Inn keeps a riverside garden with seating for more than two hundred people, backing onto the Derwent between Curbar and Calver, directly below the gritstone edges. It is a 17th-century inn, reopened in July 2025 under new management with a new chef, and the decor runs to bank notes and antique fire-fighting equipment. Food comes out from noon to eight, noon to five on Sundays: meat pies, calamari, lamb shanks, and a Sunday roast that reviewers single out. Desserts include churros and, less predictably, Yorkshire pudding. Three pumps rotate cask ales from Peak Ales, Thornbridge, Stancil, Bradfield and Abbeydale. Dogs are welcome throughout, garden included. One TripAdvisor review called it a "Fantastic Food... Dog friendly Old English style pub," which is roughly the pitch.

Above the village are the edges. From the Curbar Gap car park a flat loop of about 1.7 miles runs along the escarpment with views down the Derwent Valley, often past grazing Highland cattle. Longer walks link Curbar Edge to Froggatt, White and Baslow Edges. On Baslow Edge you pass Wellington's Monument, a gritstone cross put up in 1866 by a local doctor, Dr E.M. Wrench, in tribute to the Duke of Wellington, and the Eagle Stone, a lone weathered boulder that young Baslow men were once expected to climb to prove themselves fit to marry.

Village Life and Connections

Curbar itself is a hillside village at 958 feet, sheltering under the edges on the west bank of the Derwent — steep lanes and gritstone cottages. It is largely residential now. It once had two village shops, but everyday shopping is in neighbouring Calver or Baslow. The road out is the A623; Grindleford station on the Hope Valley line is about three miles, and the 257 bus runs seven days a week to Baslow, Calver and Eyam. In summer the Peak Sightseer open-top bus passes through along the Derwent.

Plague History in the Fields

Out in the fields stands the village lock-up, a small late 18th-century square building with a conical stone roof, built to hold prisoners overnight between assizes. In the 1920s a man known as Pelly the Sailor lived in it. Nearby are the five flat Cundy Graves, carved with initials: Thomas and Ada Cundy and their children Olive, Nellie and young Thomas, who died when the Great Plague reached Curbar in 1632 — more than thirty years before the outbreak in Eyam, the better-known plague village.

All Saints and the Rutland Estate

All Saints' is the newcomer. Its foundation stone was laid in 1867 so that Calver and Curbar people no longer had to walk two miles to Baslow for a service. Anthony Salvin designed it; the Duke of Rutland gave the land. For centuries the village belonged to the Rutland estate, until it was auctioned off at Bakewell in 1927 and most tenants bought their own homes and land.

The Maybough Tradition

Every May Day the Maybough still goes round: a tree branch decorated with flowers, carried through Curbar and Calver with songs and dancing. The villagers used to do it. Now it's the school.