Bethel Chapel sits near the middle of Hollinsclough, a Methodist chapel built in 1801 by John Lomas, a pedlar and tinker who carried local silk over the moors to the mills at Macclesfield. One winter's night in 1783 his wife persuaded him to hear a Mr Costerdine preach; he was converted, moved to the village in 1785, and put the chapel up as a monument to his faith. It is still the only chapel open in the old Wetton and Longnor circuit, and it marked its bicentenary at Easter 2001.
The chapel hall doubles as the village tearoom. The Chapel Tearoom opens weekends and bank holidays for afternoon tea and coffee cake — a local calls it "our lovely tearoom" — and it is the only place in the village for a cup of tea. For anything else you go to Longnor, about 1¾ miles east over the ridge, with its weekly market and Victorian market hall from 1873.
There is no pub. The nearest two are both in Longnor. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Inn is a Robinsons house that traces its origins to a cheese store of 1464, when cheese made at Reapsmoor and Glutton was carried up to Buxton; it still has a reputation for good food. The Crewe & Harpur Arms, a former coaching inn on the London–Buxton road, is now a self-catering house that sleeps thirty-four rather than a pub you can walk into.
Hollinsclough itself is a crossroads of cottages and farmhouses on the upper River Dove, near where the Dove and the Manifold rise on the eastern edge of Axe Edge Moor; the Dove marks the Staffordshire–Derbyshire boundary here. What dominates is the pair of limestone summits to the north: Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill, two pyramid-shaped reef knolls left over from a tropical coral reef, said to resemble a sleeping dragon. The circular over both — the Dragon's Back — is about 4.5 miles and 389 metres of ascent from the village, roughly two and a half hours, with rocky scrambling that turns slippery in the wet. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and a common place to start. The Washgate packhorse bridge carries an early-eighteenth-century route over the Dove into the Goyt Valley.
The Church of St Agnes is the grandest listed building in the parish, Grade II*. Sir George Crewe built it in 1840 by converting a barn into a church and a school; worship stopped in 1966, and after decades as a residential field centre it was auctioned in 2023 and is being restored as a home.
There is no Domesday entry for the place; it first surfaces in the records in the 1390s, as "Howelsclough." The silk weaving is long gone, and the population has thinned the way hill-farming villages do: 112 names on a list of 1769, 149 residents at the 2021 census.
You arrive by car or not at all: Buxton, the nearest station, is nine miles and a fifteen-minute drive, and there is no bus to speak of. The primary school closed in 2015 and reopened as an academy, and remains one of the smallest in the country.
By the old chapel there is a small green with a bench. That is about the size of the village's public life, and enough for it.
