Earl Sterndale

The Headless Sign and Four Centuries of Trade

The pub sign in Earl Sterndale shows a woman with no head, above the motto "Soft Words Turneth Away Wrath." The pub is the Quiet Woman, and the story runs that a former landlord's wife, Chattering Charteris, nagged so relentlessly — even in her sleep — that he cut off her head. The village approved so heartily that they had a whip round to pay for her headstone.

The Quiet Woman is one of only three English pubs of that name. It is a stone free house, largely unmodernised, reputedly over 400 years old and built from three early-seventeenth-century cottages knocked together. The Heathcote family ran it for well over three centuries, from Joseph Heathcote, who died in 1811, down to Herbert Heathcote in the 1920s. For years it was a haunt of folk-music enthusiasts.

When the Pub Fell Quiet

It is also, at present, shut. The much-loved landlord Ken Mellor died in August 2020 and the pub closed on his death and has stayed closed. Four hundred years of trade, paused. It's worth knowing before you arrive expecting a pint.

That leaves the village small and quiet in the ordinary sense. Earl Sterndale sits in the Upper Dove Valley at about 1,100 feet, south of Buxton, with the River Dove marking the Derbyshire–Staffordshire border nearby. There are no shops to speak of; the economy here has always been farming and quarrying. For cheese you go to Hartington, about 4.7 miles away in a straight line, where the shop still sells artisan cheeses on the site of a creamery the Duke of Devonshire founded in the 1870s.

Reef Hills and the Bear Skull

What people come for is the walking, and it is very good. The classic circuit is the Dragon's Back — Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill, two limestone reef knolls left over from a coral reef that grew at the edge of a tropical lagoon some 340 million years ago. Chrome Hill's serrated ridge is often likened to a stegosaurus's spine. It's rated hard, with steep ascents, and you can reach it without a car: the 442 Ashbourne bus from Buxton stops in the village.

Above the village stands High Wheeldon, a National Trust hill of about 422 metres given as a memorial to the men of Derbyshire and Staffordshire who died in the Second World War. On its north slope is Fox Hole Cave, which came to light in 1928 when a dog disappeared down what looked like a fox hole and a boy crawled in after it and came back holding a bear skull. Excavation turned up material from the Upper Palaeolithic onward, including what looks like a ritual burial of a brown bear's skull.

The Church the Bombs Found

The church, St Michael and All Angels, was rebuilt in 1828 in what Pevsner-minded writers call Carpenter's Gothic, keeping a twelfth-century font from the chapel before it. On 9 June 1941 a Heinkel 111 dropped incendiaries on it — reputedly the only Derbyshire church bombed in the war, the raid aimed at an explosives dump near Buxton. It was patched up and properly restored in 1952.

A Gothic School and Its Benefactor

The village school, closed now, is a delicate gothic thing from around 1853, built in the style of Sir Joseph Paxton. Someone raised the money for it: Thomas Lomas of Glutton Grange, whose farm is still down the lane.