A factory on the edge of town makes up to ten million Love Hearts a day. Swizzels has been in New Mills since 1940, when the Matlow brothers moved the operation up from London to get away from the Blitz, and it still runs out of a former textile mill. Love Hearts were invented here in 1954, and the sweets have carried as many as 7,300 different romantic phrases over the years. Princess Diana came to look round in 1990.
That gives you the shape of the place: an old cotton town that found other uses for its mills. New Mills sits at the confluence of the Goyt and the Sett, on the north-western edge of the Peak District, about half an hour by train from Manchester Piccadilly. There are two stations, which is generous for a town this size — Central on the Hope Valley Line and Newtown on the Buxton Line to Buxton.
The defining feature is the Torrs, a gorge cut seventy feet down through sandstone with the river running along the bottom. The best way to see it is the Torrs Millennium Walkway, a 175-yard steel walkway bolted to the cliff wall seventy feet above the Goyt. It opened in 2000 and cost £525,000. Below it, Torr Vale Mill sits on a rocky outcrop in a bend of the river; it made towelling until December 2000, the longest continuous run of cotton production anywhere in the UK.
For a gentler walk, the Sett Valley Trail runs two and a half level miles along a former railway line to Hayfield, at the foot of Kinder Scout. It's flat, buggy-friendly, and shared with cyclists and horse riders as part of the Pennine Bridleway. You could spend a car-free week here quite happily.
New Mills once had as many as thirty-six pubs. There are fewer now, though the Rail Ale Trail reckons the beer is quite possibly the best it has ever been. The Beer Shed on Market Street is a narrow micropub with cask ales, craft and continental bottles; muddy boots are welcome, children until six. The Pack Horse on Mellor Road keeps three handpumps of ever-changing, often rare beers and has a large garden out the back that reviewers call a sun trap. The Masons Arms claims to be the oldest pub in old New Mills.
The one worth the detour is the Fox Inn at Brookbottom, a hamlet outside town you reach on foot along footpaths and bridleways. It has horse brasses on the walls, a jukebox that only plays 45s, a roaring log fire, and a good range of Robinsons cask ales. Reviewers order the Lebanese lamb special and the lasagne. One called it "one of Derbyshire's best kept secrets"; another said walking in "is like stepping back in time," complete with "a charmingly grumpy landlord." He is, for the record, the pub's longest-serving.
For something to take home, Torrside Brewery sits by the Peak Forest Canal, making smoked stouts and barley wines with names like Rauchwine, an eleven per cent smoked barley wine. Co-founder Pete Sidwell put the plan simply: "We just want to keep on brewing the interesting beers we like and enjoying it."
Every late September the town holds a two-week festival that ends in a lantern procession through the streets.
