Eyam

Inn, Landscape and Village Flavours

The Miners Arms was built in 1630, thirty-five years before the plague arrived, and it is the only pub left in the village. It was the Kings Head until 1764, when it was renamed after the lead- and fluorspar-mine owners who held their Barmote Court meetings here — the mining liberty of Eyam and Stoney Middleton still has its own court, twelve jurymen and a Barmaster, and this is where they used to meet. The landlord is Ian Jackson, locally born; the kitchen is run by chefs Rachel Nuttall and Eddie Abbott under manager Ruth Nuttall. The food leans French and Mediterranean with a lot of fish — tuna steak on ratatouille, herb-crusted salmon with sweet chilli — alongside hunters chicken, lamb tagine, steak and ale pie, and Bakewell pudding served hot with custard and ice cream. There are three well-kept real ales, usually one from a local brewery. Dogs are welcome in the bar and in the B&B rooms. The pub is reputedly haunted, and one TripAdvisor reviewer decided the matter for good: "The pub may be haunted but the atmosphere is so friendly they can only be good spirits."

Eyam is a gritstone village strung along a shelf on the north side of Middleton Dale, about 900 feet up, where the White Peak limestone meets the Dark Peak grit. Moorland rises to the north — Eyam Moor, Sir William Hill — and the limestone dales fall away to the south toward Stoney Middleton. The lanes are narrow and lined with stone cottages, and from the tops you can see clear across to Hathersage, Stanage Edge and Win Hill. It is a small place given largely over to visitors now, which is a change from what it once was.

In 1842 the village historian William Wood counted five inns. The Miners Arms is the only survivor. The Bold Rodney, the Rose and Crown, the King's Arms and the old Eyam Bull's Head have all closed, and one of them is now serving scones. The Eyam Tea Rooms occupy a 17th-century building that was originally a dance hall attached to the Bold Rodney Inn before it was converted in 1912 — the date is still encoded in the trading email address. Jasmine and Ben run it now. Breakfast comes as the "Muddy Boots" or a "Meat Free" version; reviewers single out the Harringtons steak and ale pie and the Derbyshire oatcakes, which one called the best in Derbyshire. There is a separate gluten-free menu and vegan specials on the board, and dogs are offered a treat.

Courtyards, Tea Rooms and Foolow

If you want the other tea room, you have to know it is there. Ivy Cottage Vintage Tea Room sits at the end of a narrow footpath off Eyam Square, and it opens on Sundays only, eleven until five. Kathleen runs it alone. She serves an English Sunday roast between noon and two, homemade soups, scones with clotted cream, and a fruit pie of the day. Reviewers reach for words like "magical" and one compared it to something out of a Beatrix Potter book.

Up at Eyam Hall, the former farm buildings have been turned into a courtyard of independent shops that stays open all year except January. The café there is called The Buttery — scones, Bakewell tart, leek-and-potato soup, Victoria sponge. Delightful Living, an interiors shop in the Courtyard Barn, was named regional winner for Best Lifestyle Store at the 2024 Muddy Stiletto Awards; owners Anne Hyde and Paul McGeevy stock handmade chocolates from Bakewell, candles from Castleton and Sheffield prints, having started the whole thing in 2008 with Anne upcycling reclaimed wood into signs at home. For provisions there is the General Stores on Church Street, a fruit-and-veg stall at the corner of Main Road and Hawkhill Road on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and Peak Pantry, the village bakery.

The nearest pub after the Miners Arms is a mile and a half west, in Foolow, and you can walk to it. The Bull's Head there dates to the mid-18th century and was once one of five pubs in that hamlet too — it is the last one standing. Nick and Jemma Beagrie took it over in 2023; the head chef is Blake Arnold, and the menu runs to celeriac and white truffle soup, slow-braised Derbyshire pork belly, chicken and smoked ham hock pie, and sticky ginger pudding. The house beer, Bull's Head Bitter, is brewed by Peak Ales over at Bakewell, and there is a pie and a pint for £21.95. Dogs are welcome at the bar, and the Stable Room is a dog-friendly space with water put down.

Moorland Walks and Family Days

The walking starts at the front door. The gentlest outing is the Riley Graves circular, a short walk to an isolated, circular-walled plot where Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children over eight days one summer, all of them dead of plague, all of them buried by her own hands. The National Trust maintains it. For a fuller day, the Eyam and Sir William Hill circular runs about seven miles with 450 metres of climbing, passing the Riley Graves before dropping into Stoney Middleton, and a shorter moorland loop bags the Sir William Hill trig point with those wide views north over the gritstone edges. The Eyam Plague Trail, six and a half miles, links Mompesson's Well, the Boundary Stone, the Riley Graves and Cucklet Delph — the four places where the quarantine actually happened.

Higher on Eyam Moor, well off the tourist track, is Wet Withens, a Bronze Age embanked stone circle over thirty metres across — the largest of its kind in Derbyshire. One of its stones, the Chair Stone, has a ledge cut into its face like a seat. The Romans mined lead up here too, and coins bearing the names of many emperors have been turned up on the moor over the years.

Families do well for a week. The Eyam Museum, opposite the sports field, tells the story of the plague, the lead mining and the silk weaving, plus a room tracking the village men who left to fight in the First World War; admission is £6 for adults, £4 for children, £16 for a family. The Eyam Sports Association keeps up the cricket pitch, the football pitch, a multi-use games area and a children's play area. The ancient stocks still stand on the green beside the visitor centre. And at the end of August, during Wakes Week, three of the village wells are dressed with petal artwork and the whole thing builds to the Carnival, which is the Sports Association's biggest fundraiser of the year.

Church, Plague and Older Eyam

St Lawrence's Church is worth an hour. The churchyard cross is Anglo-Saxon, Mercian work of the 8th or 9th century, one of the most complete in the country — about eight feet high now, with angels holding sceptres carved on the head and a Virgin and Child on the shaft. On the south wall of the chancel there is a large sundial of 1775 that marks not just the hours but the months, the days, the signs of the zodiac and the direction of distant places including Mecca, Tenerife and Quebec, signed by the churchwardens Willi Lee and Thomas Froggatt. Inside is the Mompesson Chair, dated 1665, and in the north aisle a stained-glass window telling the story of the outbreak. Catherine Mompesson's tomb is in the churchyard.

Her story is the one people come for. In late August 1665 a bundle of damp cloth arrived from London for the tailor Alexander Hadfield. His assistant, George Viccars, opened it and hung it by the fire to dry, and he was the first to die, on the 6th of September. As the deaths mounted, the young rector William Mompesson, then twenty-eight, and the ejected Puritan minister Thomas Stanley persuaded the village to seal itself off — no one to enter, no one to leave — so the plague would not spread to the surrounding communities. Services were moved outdoors to the natural amphitheatre of Cucklet Delph. Families buried their own dead. Food was left at boundary stones and at Mompesson's Well, and coins were paid into water and vinegar to disinfect them. Of roughly 350 people, an estimated 260 died over fourteen months; the parish records name 273. The plague did not spread beyond Eyam. Catherine Mompesson, who had nursed the dying, died on the 25th of August 1666, aged twenty-seven. Her husband survived. Since the bicentenary in 1866 there has been a Plague Sunday service at Cucklet Delph on the last Sunday of August, which is also Wakes Week.

None of this troubled the Domesday surveyors, who got here in 1086 and valued the whole place at one pound — exactly what it had been worth twenty years earlier, before any of it happened. The rectory where the poet Anna Seward was born in 1742 no longer stands; it was rebuilt in 1960. The village was once styled "the Athens of the Peak" for the four poets who lived here, which is a considerable claim for a village of stone cottages on a moorland shelf.

Arrivals and a Final Decision

Getting here is straightforward. Eyam sits just north of the A623 through Middleton Dale, five miles from Bakewell and about fifteen from Sheffield. The nearest stations are Grindleford, two and a half miles off, and Hathersage, both on the Hope Valley line, and the 65 bus runs daily between Sheffield and Buxton through the village. Castleton, Chatsworth and Hathersage's open-air heated pool are all inside twenty minutes by car.

In the churchyard, look for the tall headstone of Harry Bagshaw, a Derbyshire cricketer who became a first-class umpire. He is buried here in his umpiring coat, reputedly with a bat and ball, and the top of his stone is carved as a hand with one finger raised — the umpire's signal for out. He is giving, from the grave, his last decision.