Flagg

Paths, a Dry Village and Community

The Limestone Way runs straight through the middle of Flagg, which is more or less the point of the place. The village sits at the end of Day 1 of the long-distance route from Castleton, and the paths spread out from it across the limestone plateau in every direction. At about a thousand feet up, halfway between Bakewell and Buxton, it is a farming village of drystone walls, scattered farmhouses and a good deal of wind.

What Flagg does not have is a pub. The Plough closed a few years ago, and the village is now, by any reasonable definition, dry. The nearest pint is the Bull i' th' Thorn, a coaching inn out on the A515 that reputedly dates to 1472 and has a carved oak sign above the door showing a bull caught in a thorn bush.

There is a tea room, though, along with a chapel, a nursery school and a village hall. Peak District Online reckons this gives Flagg "a community spirit that is hard to rival amongst other hill villages in the Peak District," which for a parish of 192 people is a fair amount of infrastructure.

Walks, Races and Chapels

The walking is the reason most people come. A circular from neighbouring Taddington runs about seven miles, climbing towards Sough Top and crossing more drystone-wall stiles than you will want to count before dropping steeply into Chelmorton; the view from Sough Lane is rated one of the best in the Peak District. Another route loops out to Monyash across the plateau.

For one day a year, Flagg is busy. Every Easter Tuesday the High Peak Hunt holds point-to-point races on Flagg Moor — "Derbyshire's equivalent to the Grand National," and one of the oldest meetings of its kind. They have run since 1892, and by the mid-1980s only about ten old-fashioned point-to-points survived in the country. Flagg is now the only one, and the only meeting still to run the Hunt Members' race over natural hunting country, starting out in the open between Flagg and Pomeroy. The future Edward VIII once rode here as Prince of Wales.

Flagg has no medieval parish church — it is a village of chapels rather than churches. The Methodist Chapel was completed in 1839, with the former village school, now the nursery, standing beside it. A former Unitarian church of 1838 is a private house.

From Flagun to Flagg Hall

The name is older than any of the buildings. The Domesday Book of 1086 records the place as "Flagun," from an Old Norse word meaning a sod of peat, or turf. It was probably a Viking settlement, and probably a lead-mining one — the spoil heaps and disused shafts are still there in the fields around.

Of the four listed buildings, two stand out: Flagg Hall, a late-seventeenth-century manor of three storeys, and the Old Farmhouse at Town Head Farm, dated 1639.

The Old Railway and a Nippy Farewell

Bakewell, with its pudding and its Monday market, is six miles east; Buxton and its Georgian spa are to the north. There is no station — the railway closed in 1968 — but the old line survives nearby as the Monsal Trail, a traffic-free path through the dales.

Dave Welford, who writes the walkswithwelf blog, summed the place up after one visit. "I like Flagg a lot," he wrote. "Even when it's nippy."