On the green at Litton there is a set of old wooden stocks, positioned directly in front of the pub, which is either good planning or a long-running joke about where the trouble tends to come from. Behind them stand the steps of an old market cross topped with a 19th-century gritstone obelisk. The green is where the village organises itself — the primary school with its forty-odd children sits on it, and so does most of village life.
The pub is the Red Lion, and it is one of the reasons to come. It first opened in 1787, converted from three miners' cottages, and it has stayed the sort of place that gets described as unspoilt: thick stone walls, wood panelling, three small rooms with log fires. The kitchen does beef stew with garlic, chilli and lemon butter and a warm baguette, proper pies with mash or hand-cut chips and homemade gravy, and a Derbyshire beef burger with mature Cheddar and bacon marmalade. Chef Steven Brook's steak and kidney pies have their own small following. It won a TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice award, keeps five Cask Marque real ales, and was Sheffield & District CAMRA's Derbyshire Pub of the Year in 2023.
Dogs are welcome throughout. The pub dog is Ula, whose billing on the Red Lion's own website reads: "Ula the pub dog, welcomes well behaved owners!"
Across the village is the Community Shop, which is a café and post office as well, run out of the old smithy. It opened in September 1999 as the first village-owned and run shop in Derbyshire, saved from closure by residents and staffed by around thirty unpaid volunteers. You can sit outside with tea, coffee and homemade cake.
The walking starts more or less at the door. A circular of about eight miles runs down through Tideswell Dale and along the River Wye through Miller's Dale and Water-cum-Jolly Dale — a stretch hemmed in by high cliffs — before dropping into Cressbrook Dale, a limestone chasm named for the watercress once grown in its stream. The flat, traffic-free Monsal Trail, a former railway line, runs nearby for anyone who would rather cycle than climb.
At the northern end of Cressbrook Dale is Peter's Stone, also called Gibbet Rock. In 1815 Anthony Lingard of Litton murdered Hannah Oliver, the tollhouse keeper at Wardlow Mires, and was undone by a pair of red shoes he had stolen from her. He was the last man gibbeted in Derbyshire. His chained skeleton hung on Peter's Stone until 1826, when it was removed after complaints about the bones chattering in the wind.
Litton sits high on a limestone plateau, almost a thousand feet up, a mile east of Tideswell and about five from Bakewell. There is no station; Andrews of Tideswell runs a bus through roughly every two hours. Let's Go Peak District calls it "an utterly charming White Peak village, small but perfectly formed."
Come the first of May, the schoolchildren dance the maypole on the green in Victorian costume, a few feet from the stocks.
