The Pack Horse sits at 3–5 Market Street and carries a Michelin listing, which is a lot of kitchen for a village at the foot of a moor. It cooks modern seasonal British food and doesn't publish its prices online, so you book and you find out. It also turns up in the Good Food Guide and on the Top 50 Gastropubs list.
If that sounds like effort, the Sportsman Inn on Kinder Road is the other kind of pub. It's a walkers' inn with rooms, a terraced beer garden near the Pennine Way trailhead, and homemade food — steak, beer-battered fresh haddock and chips, locally sourced Sunday roasts served twelve till seven. The ales are Thwaites Original, IPA and Gold, with rotating guests and a wide range of whisky. Dogs are welcome. It closes Mondays except bank holidays, and booking is essential.
Hayfield once had seventeen pubs, dozens of small shops and a gas works. It now has six pubs and a handful of shops: a chemist, a post office, grocers, and an art gallery and gift shop that Visit Peak District calls "a popular art gallery and gift shop."
The Royal Hotel stands beside the church, the cricket ground and the River Sett. It was built in 1755 by the parishioners of Hayfield for their vicar, the Rev. John Badley, and has an oak-panelled bar with a seasonal log fire. The couple running it retired in March 2023 and it closed; a "Save The Royal at Hayfield" campaign followed.
The cricket club plays on that ground by the river. When it needed £5,000 to buy the land, Arthur Lowe helped raise it. Lowe — Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army — was born in the village in 1915, and a blue plaque marks the spot.
The walking is the reason most people come. Kinder Scout rises straight out of the village, and the classic ascent runs about nine miles past Bowden Bridge and Kinder Reservoir to the 2,088ft plateau and Kinder Downfall. For something flatter there's the Sett Valley Trail, a two-and-a-half-mile former railway line to New Mills that takes buggies, bikes and horses. Lantern Pike is a steadier climb with wide views back over Kinder, rocky and muddy in places.
On 24 April 1932, hundreds set off from Bowden Bridge Quarry led by twenty-year-old Benny Rothman to assert the right to roam. The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass fed into the 1949 National Parks legislation and the Pennine Way, and a 5.2-mile circular still retraces the route. Rothman came back at seventy to unveil the plaque.
The village is older than any of this. Domesday recorded it as "Hedfeld," a clearing in forest, on a packhorse route between Cheshire and Yorkshire. St Matthew's was rebuilt in 1818 on foundations dating to 1386; Pevsner called it "characteristic of its date."
New Mills station is about three miles off, and the High Peak 61 bus stops at the station in the Sett Valley Trail car park. Kinder Reservoir, built in 1911, finally tamed the flooding that used to plague the place. Every year the village still dresses its wells.
