Froggatt

The inn and everyday essentials

The Chequers Inn sits on the A625 directly below Froggatt Edge, and from its woodland garden you can walk straight up onto the escarpment. It's a 16th-century freehouse with seven en-suite rooms, run by Jonathan and Joanne Tindall since 2002, and it has held an AA Rosette for its food every year since 2004. The fan favourite is the "proper" steak and local ale pie, which they'll also sell you to take home. Sunday lunch is a freshly roasted loin of pork or sirloin of beef, with turkey at Christmas. The ales are hand-pulled from breweries within fifteen miles — Peak Ales from the Chatsworth Estate, Thornbridge from Bakewell, Bradfield and Stancill from Sheffield. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the garden, though not the restaurant.

That is the extent of Froggatt's commercial life. There are no shops. For everyday things you drive two minutes to Calver.

Bridge, river and edges

The village is a small cluster of gritstone houses on narrow lanes beside the River Derwent, directly beneath the edge. Let's Go Peak District calls it "a small but perfectly formed place; a cluster of stone houses on narrow lanes, nestling beneath the mighty gritstone escarpment of Froggatt Edge." The 17th-century bridge over the river has two mismatched arches — a semi-circular one from the original build and a wider, pointed one added when the bridge was widened in 1846. Nobody seems to have minded that they don't match.

The walking is why most people come. The Three Edges circular, six to eight miles, links Froggatt Edge with Curbar and White Edge along the gritstone escarpments; the heather on top turns purple in summer. The Derwent Valley Heritage Way runs right through the village along the river, and riverside paths from the bridge lead one way to Calver and the other to Grindleford. Up on the edge itself, a favourite of climbers, there is a Bronze Age stone circle — about eleven stones, fifteen metres across — and, at the foot of the crag, a scatter of half-finished millstones, abandoned where the trade left them.

Origins and getting here

Froggatt does not appear in the Domesday Book. The land was part of the manor of Baslow and was only carved out when the Bassett family bought it in the 1200s; John Froggecotes bought his piece around 1290. The name is older still, recorded as Froggegate in 1203 and probably meaning "frog cottage," after the damp, spring-fed ground by the Derwent. Around two hundred years ago the Duke of Rutland had seventeen cottages built here by local stonemasons for his tenants. Industry was farming, lead mining, lime burning and weaving, all of it gone now.

Grindleford station, on the Hope Valley Line between Manchester and Sheffield, is a short drive away; Chatsworth about ten minutes. Buses are rural and, in the local phrasing, "perhaps not as frequent" as elsewhere.

Woodland and village tradition

Sixteen acres of open woodland above the village, Froggatt Wood, were left to the National Trust by Lady Riverdale in memory of Charles and Josephine Bingham, and you can walk in them freely. The Horticultural Society has held its show on the August Bank Holiday Saturday since 1935 — ninety years of it in 2025, in a village of 185 people.