The Sycamore Inn keeps the village shop in a small room off the bar. The independent shop closed when times got hard, so the villagers reopened it inside the pub — which means Parwich is a place where you can buy your provisions and a pint of Robinson's cask ale without leaving the same 17th-century building.
The kitchen does home-cooked comfort food: steak and ale pie, chicken pie, Cumberland Scotch eggs, cajun chicken and cajun halloumi skewers, and a Sunday roast with Yorkshire puddings. For pudding there's treacle sponge with custard, or a crème brûlée. One reviewer who admits to being hard on pub roasts called this one the best they'd had.
Well-behaved dogs are welcome, and you may be met at the door by a Basset hound. There's a beer garden and a covered terrace round the back. Darts on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, quiz nights, live music. The number, should you need it, is 01335 390212.
The village itself gathers around an open green with a stream running through it, limestone houses on all sides and fields and hills beyond. This is White Peak country, seven miles north of Ashbourne. The name is a Celtic-Saxon splice: "Par-" for the local brook, "wich" for a dairy farm.
The walking is the main reason to be here. The Tissington Trail runs traffic-free for thirteen miles along an old railway line that closed in 1964 and reopened as a path in 1971; you can join it near the village. The Limestone Way crosses the parish west to east, and the Peak District Boundary Walk runs through north to south. For a shorter loop, the four-mile circular to Tissington and Alsop-en-le-Dale crosses the Bletch Valley and comes back a different way. Dovedale, with its stepping stones and Thorpe Cloud, is a few miles west.
Getting here means driving. There's no station — Ashbourne, seven miles off, is the nearest — and the buses are the limited rural sort. The village sits about a mile from the B5056, with a car park on its eastern edge as you come in.
St Peter's Church was rebuilt in 1872–73 and opened the following October. Pevsner was not charmed, calling it "unfeelingly hard-edged and rock-faced." The rebuild kept the older church's Norman doorway, its carved tympanum and its chancel arch, and there are medieval grave slabs still in the churchyard.
The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Pevrewic, royal land: three villagers, two smallholders, three plough teams, held for the king by a man named Kolli. Later it passed through the Earls of Derby, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Cokaynes before the Levinges built Parwich Hall and then spent much of their time somewhere else.
The parish has kept better records of its quarrels than most. In the 1890s the vicar, Claude Lewis, made himself so unpopular that the villagers burnt his effigy on the Green. He moved to Wales.
Come the last weekend of June, the Oddfellows Procession forms up — nearly a hundred members in their best clothes, carrying staves and banners behind a brass band, marching to church and then to dinner at the Memorial Hall.
