The geological boundary between limestone and gritstone runs straight down Elton's main street. Houses on the north side are built of one stone, houses on the south of the other, with different plants growing around them. Most villages sit on one kind of rock. Elton sits on the seam.
It sits high, too — about 271 metres, which makes it one of the higher Peak villages and, by most accounts, one of the colder ones. Alf Gregory, who photographed the 1953 Everest expedition and lived here, called it "a cold place," and said it was like being on the top of a mountain. In the winter of 1933 the village was cut off by snow until the local men dug a channel through the drifts to reach Winster.
Winster is where you go for a shop, because Elton doesn't have one. It has a post office, a village hall and a sports field, and that is the extent of it. The nearest shops are about 1.2 miles away.
The pub is the Duke of York, opposite Well Street, and it does not serve food. It opens in the evenings from around half past eight, and it's closed on Mondays. What it has instead of a menu is its interior: a central tiled corridor, a rear bar reached through a partition wall, a snug with a Victorian fireplace and a quarry-tiled floor, fixed benches, wood panelling, and a real fire. CAMRA lists it on its National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors — one of roughly five such pubs in Derbyshire — and grades it three stars, "a pub interior of outstanding national historic importance."
It has been in the same family since 1968. Mary Elliot ran it for decades until she died in 2022; her nephew Anthony runs it now. There's one changing beer from Marston's and a blazing coal fire in the lounge on a cold night. The flagged courtyard out back stands where the outdoor toilets and the old pigsty used to be.
The walking starts at the church. The main circular runs about four miles across Harthill Moor to Robin Hood's Stride, a gritstone outcrop with two chimney-like pinnacles that legend says Robin Hood leapt between. On the way you pass Cratcliffe Rocks, where a carved crucifix still survives under an overhang that once sheltered a medieval hermit, and Nine Stones Close, a stone circle now down to four stones — one of the missing ones was reused as a field gatepost.
All Saints' Church is a plain Georgian rebuild of 1812. It replaced a medieval church whose spire collapsed in 1800, blamed locally on illegal lead miners undermining the ground beneath it. The old font fared no better: the vicar of Youlgreave carried it off to use as a water butt, and it never came back.
Elton was a lead-mining village for centuries, and has largely escaped the tourist trade that found its neighbours. Walkers pass through on the Limestone Way; buses come eight or nine times a day on the 172 from Bakewell and Matlock, and not at all on a Sunday. Well Street, at the bottom, takes its name from the well, which once had a decorative siphon-pump. The cricket club still restricts its membership to people from the village.
