The Bull's Head keeps a dog, a large beer garden, and up to four well-kept ales at any one time, and its garden opens straight onto the village children's play park. This is convenient if you have brought both a dog and a child, and a reasonable summary of what Monyash expects of its visitors: walkers, families, and people who have been on their feet since Lathkill Dale.
It is a listed building from the late 17th or early 18th century, one of the oldest in the village, and run by the same family for over twenty years. Dogs are welcome in the bar and pool room but not the dining rooms, which the pub calls elegant and means it. The ales rotate through Wincle, Storm, Bear Town, Bradfield, Kelham Island, Hartington and Peak Ales, with Timothy Taylor Landlord served regularly. The food is home-made from local produce, with daily specials and a board. It is worth knowing that this is the sole survivor of five pubs the village once had.
On the green, the Old Smithy Tearooms occupies the former smithy and does a full English breakfast that its 556-plus reviewers describe, near-unanimously, as authentic and homemade. It is popular with walkers, cyclists and motorcyclists, dog-friendly, and short on parking. At weekends it fills up.
Monyash owes its existence to water. It sits at 265 metres at the head of Lathkill Dale, in limestone country where standing water is rare, but an Ice Age clay band trapped it here. Villagers made the water into meres — five of them, plus more than twenty wells, serving people, livestock and passing drovers. Only one mere survives now, Fere Mere, behind the primary school. The annual well dressing keeps the rest in memory.
The walking is the reason most people come. The circular to Arbor Low and back is about seven miles over the White Peak uplands, via Cales Dale to the Neolithic henge and stone circle sometimes called the Stonehenge of the North, returning through the upper section of Lathkill Dale. A shorter four-mile loop passes the disused Ricklow Quarry and a cave where water rushes out from underground streams — one walker's write-up calls it "wild and majestic, particularly in winter." Both start from the Chapel Street car park.
St Leonard's has a Norman core founded around 1100 and a spire large enough to notice from some distance, which is a lot of church for a village of 314 people. Inside there is a finely carved Norman three-seat sedilia in the chancel, reputed one of the finest in Derbyshire, and a 15th-century font carved with a lion and a lamb.
The rest is the usual Peak District erosion of things that used to be here. Lead mining, with its own miners' court. Limestone quarrying. Marble polishing. A Quaker meeting house left by John Gratton, who lived here 34 years. All gone; the population halved from its Victorian peak.
Buxton station is about nine miles off and Bakewell ten minutes by car. The buses run roughly four days a week, which is to say bring the car. On the green stand two trees, King and Queen, planted for the 1910 coronation and still going.
