The Devonshire Arms sits on the A623, a former 16th-century coaching inn that belonged to the Duke of Devonshire, hence the name. It is now an independent free house with seven en-suite rooms, a log burner, and two handpumps serving guest beers that change often. The kitchen runs Thursday to Sunday: homemade pies — steak and Stilton, chicken and mushroom — burgers, breakfasts made with local ingredients, and homemade chips, off a small main menu with a specials board. Dogs are welcome in the bar and outside.
Behind the pub there is a beer garden, a camping field, and a motorhome stopover. That is the food and drink here. Peak Forest has about 335 people and no butcher, deli, or farm shop, so the Devonshire Arms does the work of all three.
The village shelters in a dip below Tideswell Moor, in limestone White Peak country at roughly 300 metres, with rolling fields split by drystone walls all around. The A623 runs Chapel-en-le-Frith to Chesterfield straight through it. There is no station; the nearest running trains are at Buxton or Dove Holes, and the buses are the kind you plan a day around, so bring a car.
The walking starts at the door. The Limestone Way comes down off Cave Dale and Peveril Castle, passes through the village, and carries on into Hay Dale and Peter Dale. The Pennine Bridleway climbs from Old Dam Lane on ground secure enough to let a dog off the lead. From the top of Hay Dale it is about three-quarters of a mile north up Dam Dale.
The church is dedicated to King Charles the Martyr — Charles I, executed in 1649 — one of very few anywhere. A stained-glass window depicts him alongside the execution block and axe. The present building went up in 1876–77, replacing a chapel of 1657 that Christiana, Dowager Countess of Devonshire, founded "in defiance of Parliament" for the Royal Foresters. "Because the size of the nave is far too big for the number of people from the village who normally make up the congregation, we conduct most of our services in a side chapel," the churchwarden David Pearson told Great British Life.
That old chapel gave Peak Forest a peculiar sideline. Being extra-parochial and extra-episcopal, its minister could grant marriage licences to anyone, at any time, without banns or witnesses, which made this Derbyshire's Gretna Green. Runaway couples arrived at around sixty a year until the 1753 Marriage Act, and the incumbent carried the title "Principal Official and Judge in Spiritualities in the Peculiar Court of Peak Forest."
Above the village is Eldon Hole, the deepest natural pothole in Derbyshire at about 245 feet, named one of the Seven Wonders of the Peak by Thomas Hobbes in 1636. Folklore made it the Devil's front door.
The hamlet of Old Dam adjoins the village, a cluster of cottages that once had a pond and a corn mill, both long gone. The old water pump is still there. Every July the village dresses its well — Emma Fox, Helen Shaw-Croft, Sarah Thompson, and Sally Baker among the craftspeople in recent years — and Wakes Week brings a scarecrow competition, a beetle drive, a picnic, and a 10km fell race up the same hills the walkers came to walk.
