The Peacock at Rowsley sells its guests about seven and a half miles of river. The hotel holds exclusive fly-fishing rights on the Haddon Estate, so anyone staying can cast a line along the Wye and the Derwent where the two meet at the foot of the village. The building went up in 1652, put there by John Stevenson, agent to Lady Manners of Haddon Hall, and the peacock on the sign is the Manners family crest. It became a hotel in 1832, and Lord Edward Manners bought it back into the family in 2003. It is Grade II* listed, in the Michelin Guide, and does afternoon tea.
If that isn't the evening you had in mind, the Grouse & Claret is the other pub — a Marston's inn in an 18th-century house, named for the game shot on the surrounding estates. The menu runs to burgers, sizzling steaks, homemade kebabs and puddings, with a children's menu and cask ales from Marston's five breweries plus guest beers. One reviewer put dinner for four at around thirty pounds. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the beer garden, which gets the sun.
Rowsley sits where the Wye flows into the Derwent, on the A6 between Matlock and Bakewell. Bakewell is three miles north, Matlock five miles south and the nearest railway station. The TransPeak and the TrentBarton Sixes both stop in the village, though a car helps.
Where the old railway station stood there is now Peak Village, an outlet shopping centre with free parking, cafés and a small nature reserve. The first station, in 1849, was designed by Joseph Paxton, who built the Crystal Palace, and King Edward VII used it regularly on his way to Chatsworth, two miles up the road. Beeching closed the line in 1967. Peak Rail now runs steam trains from Rowsley South towards Matlock for anyone who misses it.
The walking heads west and up. A circuit of about four miles climbs onto Stanton Moor, a gritstone plateau at 1,096 feet, to the Nine Ladies — a Bronze Age circle of nine standing stones, said to be women turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday. It starts from a pull-in by the Recreation Ground on the road to Stanton.
St Katherine's church was a gift of the Manners family, along with the school, the village hall and the playing fields. Rowsley is an estate village and looks it. Anthony Salvin designed it in the 1850s, and inside is a mortuary chapel built for Catherine Manners, the 7th Duke of Rutland's first wife, who died at twenty-three.
The Domesday surveyors filed Rowsley as an outlier of Bakewell, on what one account calls "the tongue of fertile land between the Derwent and the Wye." They counted about seven households.
Caudwell's Mill is still working. The present mill was built in 1874 by John Caudwell and fitted with a water turbine in 1897; the family ran it as a flour business until 1978, when a charitable trust took it on and has kept it going for more than forty years. The old outbuildings hold a blacksmith, a stonemason, a glass workshop and a wood gallery, and there is a café. The wheels still turn most days, and you can carry the flour home in a bag.
