The Cheshire Cheese Inn sits on Edale Road at the foot of Lose Hill, and it is named after a debt. Salt carriers from Cheshire used it as an overnight stop on the packhorse route and paid their dues in cheese. Much of that old salt road now lies under the fields toward Edale. Inside are three snug beamed rooms, each with a coal fire, and the evening menu changes regularly and keeps a veggie Wellington on for those who want one. Black Sheep is always available, with guests like Kelham Island and Hartington Bitter passing through. The inn describes itself as offering "real ale, home cooked food, open fires, cosy accommodation and world class walks from the door," which is accurate enough that there's little to add.
There are two more pubs. The Woodroffe Arms is the village local, a Greene King house split into two drinking areas with a beer garden at the back that gets the sun. Dogs, walkers and muddy boots are all accommodated. The house dish is the Woodroffe Burger — a locally made beefburger with locally sourced bacon, freshly made coleslaw and homemade chips — and there's a Sunday roast from twelve to three.
The Old Hall Hotel, built in 1508 and licensed in 1729, anchors the village centre and claims the biggest single malt whisky selection in Derbyshire. Its tearoom, Granny May's, named after the owner's grandmother, does award-winning Derbyshire breakfasts and freshly baked scones.
Most people come to Hope to walk. The big one is the Great Ridge circular: up Lose Hill, along the ridge over Back Tor and Hollins Cross to Mam Tor, down to Castleton through Winnats Pass, then a riverside stroll home. It runs to nearly ten miles and 2,000 feet of ascent. Win Hill and Lose Hill are said to be named for a battle whose losers were beaten by forces on Win Hill. Hollins Cross is the lowest dip in the ridge, named for a cross that had gone missing by 1905.
Down in the valley, Peakshole Water meets the River Noe, and the large Hope Cement Works sits on the valley floor with its own quarry behind it.
The Church of St Peter is Grade I listed. Its Norman font is carved with a man harvesting sheaves, a falconer with a bird on his hand, and a priest. In the churchyard stands a seven-foot Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft, carved on all faces, said to date from the time of King Alfred. It spent the years after the Civil War hidden inside a schoolhouse wall and turned up in two pieces in 1858.
Hope is old. A charter of 926 records King Athelstan winning a battle nearby and buying land here from a Dane, and the village has kept the same spelling for over a thousand years. Domesday values it at £10 6s, down from £30 twenty years earlier.
Hope station is on the Hope Valley Line, roughly hourly between Sheffield and Manchester; the A625 and A6187 bring you in by road, with Castleton two miles west. Each August Bank Holiday the Hope Show fills the fields with sheepdog trials, heavy horses and vintage tractors, and in late June three of the village wells are dressed with pictures made of flower petals and leaves.
