The Coach & Horses sits on the A515, which is the main road through Fenny Bentley and, for most practical purposes, the village itself. It is a 17th-century coaching inn, run by the Dawson family — John, William, Matthew, Chris, Jack and Holly — and it is where you will end up eating, because there is no shop, no deli and no farm shop here. The kitchen leans on named Derbyshire suppliers for everything: the meat, the fish, the fruit and veg. The menu runs to a bacon and chicken roulade, a 10oz Horseshoe gammon steak, a Woodsman's pie, pan-fried sea bass, and Cajun spiced lentil cakes for anyone who'd rather not. Mains land between about £10 and £20. Sunday roast, then sticky toffee pudding.
Two cask ales are usually on, Cask Marque certified, alongside a range of malt whiskies. There's a beer garden, which is beside the busy main road, so it comes with a soundtrack. Dogs are welcome, more or less — the policy shifts, and yours may find itself directed to the garden. One reviewer's dog, Eric, reportedly had a delicious slice of ham. Another called the place a "wonderful old rustic coaching house."
The reason to be here, though, is the walking, and Fenny Bentley is well placed for it. Footpaths lead west from the old church straight onto the Tissington Trail, a former railway line now given over to walkers and cyclists. Head the other way, through Thorpe, and you reach Dovedale in about three miles — the Stepping Stones across the River Dove, and Thorpe Cloud, a conical hill that does more with its height than most. A circular of roughly three and three-quarter miles follows Bentley Brook back to the village.
The brook is worth pausing on. It's a wild brown trout and grayling stream, noted for good mayfly hatches, running through limestone country on the southern edge of the Peak District. Fenny Bentley is the National Park's southernmost village, which makes it a doorway rather than an outpost.
Opposite the church, at the front of Cherry Orchard Farm, a medieval square tower still stands. It's marked "Old Hall" on the maps and is all that survives of the Beresfords' fortified, moated manor — three storeys, no parapet any more, but the stone newel stair is still inside.
The Beresfords are the local dynasty. Thomas Beresford of Bentley Hall raised a private army and fought at Agincourt in 1415; he died in 1473. His alabaster tomb is in St Edmund's Church, and it is a strange one: he and his wife Agnes lie bundled in carved shrouds, faces hidden, and their sixteen sons and five daughters are shown the same way along the sides — all twenty-three of them faceless. The story goes that the sculptor had no likeness to work from.
The village name means "the clearing overgrown with bent grass." The Domesday surveyors, who called it Benedlege, counted fewer than five households, which puts it among the smallest settlements they bothered to record.
Everyone named Beresford, the village will tell you, is descended from the ones in the church. They hold a reunion here each spring.
