Stanton in Peak

The Flying Childers and village provisions

The Flying Childers Inn is named after a racehorse. Flying Childers belonged to the fourth Duke of Devonshire and ran in the early eighteenth century; the pub, four cottages knocked into one around the same time, has kept the name ever since. The initials WPT carved into the doorway lintels belong to William Pole Thornhill of Stanton Hall, whose family still owns it; Richard Wood and Sophie run it.

The menu is small and mostly plant-based, written with walkers in mind — homemade soup, pork pies, hot roast cobs, steak and ale pie. Wells Bombardier is the regular ale, with two changing guests often from breweries nearby. Dogs are welcome, there's a beer garden, and one TripAdvisor reviewer called it an "Authentic dog friendly pub with excellent vegan friendly menu." It has been in the Good Beer Guide many times and was CAMRA Derbyshire Pub of the Year in 2012.

That is roughly the extent of the commerce. Stanton in Peak is an estate village of 365 people with no shop, butcher or deli; for those you drive to Bakewell, five miles north, or Youlgreave.

From the gritstone village to the Nine Ladies

The village sits on a steep, winding road below Stanton Moor, its gritstone cottages leaning into the hill with mullioned windows and wide views west toward Haddon Hall and Bakewell. The moor above is a plateau of heather and bracken scattered with weathered sandstone pillars.

Walk up onto it and you reach the Nine Ladies, a Bronze Age circle of nine millstone-grit stones about eleven metres across, with an outlying King Stone. Local legend has the nine women turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath, and the King Stone as their petrified fiddler. Nearby is the Cork Stone, a fifteen-foot pillar with iron footrests carved for climbing, and the smaller Doll Tor circle.

Cricket views and the Thornhill legacy

On the southern edge of the village is the cricket ground, called "one of the prettiest views of any cricket pitch in the country" — a westward sweep from Harthill Moor to Haddon Hall. In summer the sound of leather on willow carries down over the cottages.

Most of what you see was built by the Thornhills. William Pole Thornhill, MP for North Derbyshire, raised the reading room, the Earl Grey Tower — a gritstone folly of 1833 marking the 1832 Reform Act — and Holy Trinity Church on Lees Road, effectively his private estate church. Its nave runs south to north rather than east–west, and inside is a bronze Italian holy-water stoup said to come from Bellini's workshop.

Window tax and Stanton's deeper record

Holly House, three storeys and one of the oldest buildings here, still has eight of its fourteen windows bricked up to dodge the window tax of 1697, and never reopened.

The Domesday surveyors recorded it as Stantune in 1086, a manor worth ten shillings. Older still, a charter from around 900 has Aethelflaed, daughter of King Alfred, selling two parcels of Stanton to a friend named Aldem for sixty swine and three hundred shillings.

Reaching the village and hearing its stories

There is no railway; the nearest station is Matlock, seven miles off, and the village is reached down a narrow lane from the B5056. The 172 bus passes through between Matlock and Bakewell.

By several accounts the pub landlord is happy to tell you about the village for as long as you'll listen.