The old engine shed at Hulme End sells tea now. It was rebuilt as the Tea Junction Café in 2009, on the spot where the locomotives of a narrow-gauge railway were once serviced, and it is where most walkers and cyclists stop before setting off down the Manifold Way. The village otherwise has almost nothing to buy: no shop of its own, the nearest stores and cheese shop a couple of miles east at Hartington.
You arrive by dropping down to the river. The Hartington–Warslow road, the B5054, crosses the River Manifold here at the natural gateway to the valley, and the whole hamlet arranges itself around the bridge, the water and the inn on the bank. It is limestone White Peak country, ringed by Ecton Hill and the steep sides of the valley. The road bridge you cross dates from 1819, and replaced one built in 1790.
The Manifold Inn stands opposite the Old Toll House, which once served the turnpike and the river ford. It has been trading since 1782 and has worked its way through a remarkable number of names: the Jolly Carter, the Hulme End Inn, the Wagon and Horses, the Light Railway Hotel, the Manifold Valley Hotel. The barns added in the 1800s are now twelve ensuite rooms.
The kitchen runs a home-cooked seasonal menu — a crab patty starter at £8, beer-battered haddock with chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce at £16, a traditional Sunday roast, sandwiches and jacket potatoes at lunch. One TripAdvisor reviewer called the steak and ale pie "the best pie I've ever had." Moorlands Eater found the place "extremely friendly and reasonably priced." There are two regular and two changing ales, including Hen Cloud from the Wincle Beer Company. Dogs are welcome in the bar, the conservatory and the field, where a summer bar serves barbecued food on sunny afternoons.
Next door, Bank House Farm runs a large campsite and a camper's breakfast.
The Manifold Way is the main event. Eight tarmacked miles run south from here to Waterhouses along the old railway trackbed — a gentle gradient, wheelchair- and pram-friendly, and the only metalled leisure trail in the Peak District. You pass the Ecton copper mines, the 150-metre Swainsley Tunnel, Wetton Mill with its café, and Thor's Cave, a limestone cavern set some 250 feet above the valley floor. Bikes have been hired from the old station since July 2019, which makes the flat, traffic-free route about as manageable as family cycling gets.
The railway that laid the ground for all of it was the Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway, opened in 1904 and closed in 1934. Its station was signed "Hulme End for Hartington," and it carried milk from the local dairies and tourists in summer. The trackbed became the trail in 1937. The station building is now a visitor centre, staffed at weekends and in the school holidays.
Up the valley, the Ecton mines were once the deepest in Britain — the Duke of Devonshire's Deep Ecton sank a shaft nearly a thousand feet, and its profits reputedly paid for the Crescent at Buxton. Ecton copper went into the 1866 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. It is very quiet up there now.
