The village has one pub, one car park, and no shop, and the car park is where most visits begin. From it a steep lane drops into Lathkill Dale, and the rest of Over Haddon sits on the ridge above — stone cottages on a green shelf, with the River Lathkill somewhere below and the limestone crags and woods of the White Peak beyond.
The pub is the Lathkil Hotel, run by the same family for more than forty years. Alice Grigor-Taylor took it over in 2011 from her parents, Robert and Helen. It is known first for the view, out over Lathkill Dale and a patchwork of fields, which people who keep track rate among the best panoramas in Derbyshire. There are always three real ales on and sometimes five, Whim Ales, Peak Ales and Everards Tiger among the regulars.
Lunch is a walkers' affair — soup with a crusty roll, filled rolls, venison casserole, lasagne, and a soup-and-sandwich deal for anyone just up out of the dale. The evening menu is more ambitious: goats' cheese, pear and candied pecan salad, breaded whitebait, duck à l'orange pâté, steak and kidney pie, and a venison and blackberry casserole. Pudding runs to sticky treacle tart and a Mars Bar banoffee pie.
Breakfast is worth staying for. The sausage and black pudding come from New Close Farm shop, the smoked bacon from Critchlow's of Bakewell, the eggs are local and free-range, and there are Derbyshire oatcakes. Dogs are welcome in the bar, though walkers are asked to take their boots off at the door.
There is no village shop. For a butcher, a deli, or the pudding, you go the mile to Bakewell, which also has a Monday market and the nearest family facilities.
The walking is the reason to come. From the car park the lane drops to the river, where a circular of about five kilometres follows the Lathkill past Victorian trout weirs. A stone clapper bridge, possibly medieval, crosses the water on the path south; downstream is Conksbury Bridge, a packhorse crossing beside a village that no longer exists — Conksbury was abandoned during the Black Death. Along the river you may see dippers, kingfishers and water voles, and the ruined engine house of the Mandale lead mine, one of the earliest recorded mines in Derbyshire.
In 1667 the village was home to Martha Taylor, an eighteen-year-old "fasting girl" said to have lived over a year on a few drops of water and the juice of a roasted raisin. Visitors came from across England, the Earl of Devonshire among them, and pamphlets about her reached the Royal Society. Later, Sir Maurice Oldfield grew up at Mona View, eldest of eleven children of a tenant farmer, and went on to run MI6. He is said to have been the model for both le Carré's George Smiley and Fleming's M, and is buried in St Anne's churchyard, a small estate church of 1879 that Pevsner gave only an addendum.
There is no railway; the nearest stations are Matlock, Buxton and Chesterfield, and Hulleys of Baslow's 173 bus runs roughly hourly from Bakewell, five minutes away. Most people arrive by car, and end the day back at the Lathkil, boots by the door, working out which of the three ales to have first.
