The bar of the Cock and Pullet is a single low-ceilinged room hung with many clocks, which chime together at the top of the hour. There's an open fire, and one reviewer called it a "quaint old-style pub." It looks like it has stood for centuries. It was built in 1995.
The site was a barn where cockerels and pullets ran around out front, which is where the name comes from. The pub replaced the village's original, the Devonshire Arms, now a private house. The food is plain and cheap — most meals land around £8 or £9 — and the steak and ale pie gets the most praise. There's also lasagne, plaice, gammon and chips, baguette sandwiches, vegetarian options and daily specials. Three regular real ales, one of them Timothy Taylor Landlord. Dogs are welcome, and there's a garden.
That is the whole of the village's commerce. Sheldon has no shop, no butcher, no farm shop; for anything you'll need Bakewell, four miles east. The population is around eighty people and the houses run mostly along one lane.
It sits high above the Wye, roughly 1,050 feet above sea level, on White Peak limestone. Let's Go Peak District describes it as "a cluster of characterful stone cottages on a hill, mostly built along one single lane," which is a fair account of what you see when you arrive. Sheldon is too small to have a parish council; its affairs are settled by a parish meeting.
The church, St Michael and All Angels, went up in 1864 from stone salvaged out of the partly Norman chapel that was demolished the following year. It's a single limestone cell with a rounded east end and a bellcote on the west gable, and it seats 140. In the churchyard is a memorial to Ephraim Brocklehurst, killed at Magpie Mine at twenty-five in 1860, inscribed "THERE IS BUT ONE STEP BETWEEN ME AND DEATH." The parish records also note a 1753 marriage between a fourteen-year-old boy and an eighty-year-old widow.
Magpie Mine is the reason for most of that. Just outside the village, worked from around 1740, it closed in 1958 as the last working lead mine in Derbyshire and is now the most complete lead mine left in the Peak District, Cornish engine house and all. In 1833 miners from Magpie and the rival Maypitt mine, both after the same vein, lit fires underground to smoke each other out; three Maypitt men suffocated, twenty-four Magpie miners were tried for murder and all acquitted. The dead men's widows are said to have cursed the mine, which never turned a profit again.
The walking runs out to it on field paths — a 5.5-mile circular from Ashford-in-the-Water climbs through Little Shacklow Woods to the village and on to the mine, with a longer eight-mile version through Deep Dale and Monsal Dale. There's no railway; access is by road, off the A6, between Ashford and Monyash, with the kind of bus service best described as limited.
There is also the duck. In 1601 villagers watched one fly into an ash tree and never saw it leave. When the tree was felled some three hundred years later, the boards were said to show the markings of a full-sized duck. They ended up as a mantelpiece.
