The Waterloo is a family-run inn on the A6, with rooms upstairs and a campsite next door, and it fills up with walkers and cyclists who have come off the hills wanting something filling. The kitchen delivers: chicken breast with bacon in a stilton sauce, steak and ale pie, fresh sandwiches with chips. Reviewers on TripAdvisor give it 4.5 out of 5 and use phrases like "one of the best tasting, filling and fantastic value for money meals." Dogs are welcome.
It is one of two pubs left in Dove Holes. There were once six. The Clough Inn, which started life as The Bold Hector, has been demolished; The Wanted Inn is also gone. The other survivor is the bar at the cricket club, which doubles as the village community centre and puts on live music and fundraisers, with a beer garden out the back.
The village sits high and exposed on a limestone plateau, straddling the A6 on the watershed between Buxton and Chapel-en-le-Frith, both about three miles off. Working quarries dominate the view — the CEMEX Dove Holes Quarry is the company's largest in the UK, 213 hectares of Carboniferous limestone that is over 98.5 per cent calcium carbonate. The name comes from the Celtic word for water, the same root as Dover: the water holes. In a 2001 BBC Radio 5 Live listener poll it was voted the ugliest village in Britain.
Behind the cricket pitch is a Neolithic henge. The Bull Ring is one of only two in the Peak District — the other is Arbor Low — a circular earthwork about 53 metres across with entrances north and south. Its standing stones were carted off long ago, probably for road and wall stone. It now sits next to a live quarry, four thousand years of prehistory alongside the rail freight.
There is more buried here than the henge. In 1901 a boy known only as Master Hick, helping his father at Victory Quarry, turned up fossil bones and teeth that proved to be Early Pleistocene — sabre-toothed cat, mastodon, mammoth, hyena, rhino. The bones are at Buxton Museum now. Victory Quarry is a fishing lake.
The best walking follows the Peak Forest Tramway Trail, along the route of the horse-and-gravity tramway that opened in 1796 to carry limestone down to the canal at Bugsworth. The western stretch keeps its original stone sleepers and passes a self-acting inclined plane and the Stodhart Tunnel. From the station you can strike out over the hills to Buxton, Chapel-en-le-Frith or Castleton, though the Buxton route runs to 23.5 kilometres and 834 metres of ascent, which is a serious afternoon.
The station itself is on the Buxton line — roughly hourly, six minutes to Buxton, about fifty-five to Manchester Piccadilly. It also appears, briefly, in Lewis Capaldi's video for "Someone You Loved." The bus is the 199.
Buxton Mountain Rescue has been based in the village since the 1970s. Their present base was opened in 1990 by Diana, Princess of Wales.
