The Packhorse Inn started as two miners' cottages and has been serving travellers on the packhorse routes since 1787. It sits on Main Street, and it is very small, which is why booking is essential. It has been voted into Tripadvisor's Top 10 Cosiest Pubs in Britain, and one review is simply titled "Best pub ever."
The kitchen changes its menu monthly with the seasons and specialises in meat and game — wild boar, buffalo and venison turn up on the board, alongside sharing platters and vegetarian options, all built from Derbyshire produce. The pub is tied to the Thornbridge Hall brewery up the road in Bakewell, so three Thornbridge beers are always on, including the award-winning Jaipur pale ale, with Black Sheep a regular and a rotating cider. There are three open fireplaces inside and, out back, a heated pergola for the evenings when the fires aren't enough. Muddy boots, kids and dogs are all welcome, in the pub's own words. It's closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
The village itself is small — 334 people at the last count, up from 103 in 2001. Four conjoined stone troughs stand fed by a spring that emerges where the limestone meets the shale. There are Grade II listed village stocks too, with a house beside them, which is what village justice looks like when it survives long enough to become scenery.
The main event is five minutes away on foot. Monsal Head has a viewpoint, a café, an ice cream stop and the Headstone Viaduct — 300 feet of five-arched stone reaching 70 feet above the River Wye. The railway it carried closed in the late 1960s and reopened in 2011 as the Monsal Trail, an 8.5-mile traffic-free route through six former tunnels between Chee Dale and Bakewell. It's level and buggy-friendly, which makes it rare among Peak District walks.
John Ruskin hated the viaduct. When the railway was blasted through Monsal Dale in 1863 he wrote that "every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange." The line he called an outrage is now the thing most people come to walk.
For a stiffer climb, footpaths rise from Dale Farm campsite on Moor Road up to Longstone Edge, quarried over the years for limestone and fluorspar.
Everyday shopping happens in Bakewell, four miles and ten minutes away by car, which has the banks, the supermarkets and the pudding. There's no station — the nearest mainline services are at Grindleford or Hathersage on the Hope Valley line — and the buses between Bakewell and the Longstones are the limited rural kind, so you'll want the car. The village shop, run by the Casey family for around fifty years, has closed, though a new tea garden has opened at the top of the village.
The Longsdon family have farmed here from the Manor House for 28 generations. Butts Lane is named for the archery butts that used to stand along it, which nobody has practised at for a very long time.
