You arrive at Ilam past a small roundabout with a Gothic obelisk on it. This is the Mary Watts-Russell Memorial Cross, a spire of local limestone modelled on an Eleanor Cross and restored in 2011. Beyond it the cottages begin, and they are not the cottages you expect. They have steep gables and Swiss-chalet lines, because Jesse Watts-Russell, who bought the estate in 1820 on a soap-manufacturing fortune, decided the valley looked like the Alps and rebuilt the village to match. He added a matching school house. The result is a Staffordshire hamlet doing an impression of Switzerland.
Ilam has 402 people and no pub of its own, which sounds worse than it is. The drinking is nearby and worth the short drive.
The closest is the Izaak Walton Hotel, a 17th-century country house between Ilam and Thorpe, named after the angler who fished the Dove here in the 1650s. Its Haddon Restaurant holds two AA Rosettes; the casual Dovedale Bar and Lounge serves food from noon to nine every day to non-residents, dogs included. It sits just below Bunster Hill, a short walk from the stepping stones.
Three miles off at Alstonefield, The George is a free house on the village green. You can have cask ale and simple food in the bar — no reservations, you walk in — or book the dining room, where the kitchen does a nine-course tasting menu at £90 a head and a six-course early-bird at £65. Nearer still, the Watts Russell Arms at Hopedale is the quick-drink option, named for the same family that made the village Alpine.
For daytime there is the Manifold Tea-Room in Ilam Park, run by the National Trust, doing homemade cakes and a lunch menu with seating that looks over the formal Italian Garden to Thorpe Cloud and the church. A Trust shop sits alongside.
The walking is the reason most people come. The circuit from Ilam Park to the Dovedale Stepping Stones is about seven kilometres of easy riverside path, roughly two and a half hours, running under Bunster Hill and the flat-topped cone of Thorpe Cloud. The National Trust calls it "one of the prettiest river walks in the Peak District." A quieter loop heads to Wetton, past the Boil Holes where the Manifold, having spent six miles underground, comes back up in the park.
The church, Holy Cross, is Grade I listed and older than it looks. Its font is Norman, carved around 1120 with Adam and Eve and a scattering of monsters, and still holds traces of red paint. In a chapel added in 1618 lies the shrine of St Bertram, a Mercian prince said to have turned hermit here after wolves killed his wife and child; pilgrims once came for cures.
The grand house is mostly gone — two-thirds of Ilam Hall was demolished in the 1930s, then rescued by Robert McDougall, who bought the surviving wing for the National Trust on condition it became a youth hostel. It still is one.
Ilam also claims to have been the first community in Britain to phase out incandescent light bulbs. On a warm afternoon, though, the village comes down to the Manifold to paddle in the shallows where the river resurfaces, and nobody is thinking about light bulbs at all.
