Taddington

The Pub That Is Also the Shop

In 2009 the Queens Arms put a convenience store in its pool room, and so the village shop and the village pub became the same building. It is the only pub in Taddington now — the Waterloo Inn out on the A6 closed in 2022 — which makes the Queens Arms the shop, the pool room, the beer garden, and the place you go on a Thursday, which is Pie Night: steak and ale in shortcrust. The rest of the week runs to home-made pies, Sunday dinner, bangers and mash, and chicken goujons for children, at roughly £20 to £30 a head. Dogs are welcome. One reviewer called it "exactly how a country pub should be," which is the sort of thing people say and mean.

The beer takes it more seriously than the food lets on. There's Bradfield Farmers Blonde on regularly, plus up to five changing ales from the likes of Storm, Blue Monkey, Little Critters, Whim and Front Row.

A High White Peak Village

The village runs along one long, sloping street, high up in the White Peak limestone at over 1,100 feet — one of the highest villages in England, and only just short of neighbouring Chelmorton, which holds the county record. The old A6 between Buxton and Bakewell once came straight through here as the main street, until it was bypassed in the mid-twentieth century. Both towns are about ten minutes' drive; the nearest station is Buxton, six or seven miles off. Buses between the East Midlands and Manchester still stop on the A6.

St Michael & All Angels is Grade I listed and mostly fourteenth-century, with a broach spire on its western tower. Pevsner called it "one of the prettiest and best-proportioned churches in the Peak District." Inside there's a rare stone lectern, an early wall painting, medieval coffin lids, and three fonts. Outside, in the churchyard, stands an old standing cross — some say eleventh-century, some seventh — with a two-metre shaft cut in a chevron pattern. That shaft was at one time used to support a sink in the wall of a nearby pub.

Dale, Trail and Five Wells

Taddington Dale falls away wooded to the east, down toward the River Wye and Monsal Head. From the village you can drop onto the Monsal Trail, 8.5 traffic-free miles of former railway line through the dales, which makes this a level base for cycling despite everything around it going up and down. Field paths climb the other way onto Taddington Moor to the Five Wells chambered tomb — reputedly the highest megalithic burial in Britain, at 427 metres. The antiquarian Thomas Bateman dug into it in 1846 and came out with twelve jawbones and a flint arrowhead.

Tata and Domesday Origins

The name is said to come from a Saxon chieftain called Tata, who settled here after the Romans left. In 1086 Domesday recorded eighteen villagers, four leagues of woodland, and one mill worth a shilling.

Well Dressing

In the third week of August the village dresses its wells and fills the church with flowers. The main dressed well, unusually, sits above the village rather than below it — water celebrated at the top of the hill instead of the bottom.