The New Inn sits at 1,518 feet above sea level, which makes it Britain's highest village pub, and it has been standing on this spot for over 250 years. It's built of local millstone grit, the same gritstone that the moor is made of, so it looks less placed on the landscape than grown out of it. Inside there's one regular ale plus changing guest beers, often from Storm Brewery of Macclesfield, and a small smoking patio round the back with views over the surrounding countryside. One visitor, glad to find it open again after a refurbishment, called it "really nice inside with a fine selection of drinks on offer."
The pub keeps moorland hours. The bar runs Wednesday to Sunday, food comes out Saturday and Sunday daytimes, and the landlady will open on request for walking parties, cyclists or minibus trips if you give her notice. It's the usual start and finish for the Three Shires Head walk, which is to say it's the last building most walkers see before the moor and the first they want afterwards.
Flash is the highest village in the United Kingdom, at 1,519 feet on the southern slope of Axe Edge Moor. This was contested for years with Wanlockhead in Scotland until a 2007 BBC investigation settled it in Flash's favour. Everything up here claims a superlative. Flash Bar Stores says it's England's highest shop, and occupies an old 1771 tollhouse from the Macclesfield-to-Longnor turnpike. The former Methodist chapel reckoned it was Britain's highest too. There is also, remarkably for a place this size, a village brewery.
The walking is the reason to come. The Flash and Three Shires Head circular runs from in front of The New Inn out across open moor to an 18th-century packhorse bridge over the River Dane, at the point where Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire meet. It's muddy in places, stony and steep in others, and worth every yard. Further afield there's the Roaches, with Hen Cloud and the Winking Man rock formation on Ramshaw Rocks, and Parkhouse and Chrome Hill, known as the Dragon's Back.
The three-county meeting point once had a criminal use. In the 18th century Flash gangs repurposed button-making tools to strike fake coins — the alleged origin of the term "flash money," and of "flash" as slang for counterfeit or showy. Prize fighting and cock-fighting flourished at Three Shires Head, where a pursued man simply stepped across the boundary stream into a county the officers couldn't follow him into. A servant girl's tip-off eventually ended it, with arrests and executions at Chester.
St Paul's Church was rebuilt in stone in 1901 by the Buxton architect William Radford Bryden, and inside hangs the original banner of the Flash Tea Pot Club — a friendly society where members dropped spare change into a communal teapot to cover sickness and hard times. The club dissolved in the 1990s under government regulation, but the village still holds an annual Teapot Parade.
Buxton is about ten minutes down the A53, which is worth knowing, because in winter that road is often shut and Flash spends a fair part of it cut off by snow.
