A small stream emerges from a culvert near Hall Well, runs past St Mary's Church, and ends in the village duck pond. That is more or less the plan of Tissington: pale limestone cottages with mullioned windows, wide grass verges, mature trees, and water threading through the middle of it. Around 70% of the buildings are listed, which for a place of 158 people is a high proportion.
There is no pub inside the village. The local is the Blue Bell Inn, out on the A515 at the junction by the entrance gates, technically between Tissington and Fenny Bentley. It runs to a large gastropub with over forty main courses; reviewers single out the Tissington pies, and there are usually three or four ales on. Dogs are welcome, there's a beer garden, and the pub holds two beer festivals a year.
Inside the estate, the food is daytime. Herbert's Fine English Tea Rooms, the former Old Coach House, does breakfasts, lunches and cream teas, open seven days a week from March to October. A barn nearby serves cream teas and light lunches, and there's a working butcher.
The old Post Office is now a sweet shop, Edward and Vintage, restored into jars of retro confectionery. The village blacksmith's forge is now a candle workshop. On a Wick and a Prayer, founded by Annie Maudling at Yew Tree Cottage, employs a team of nine making over twenty shapes of candle in around forty fragrances, and has been on BBC Countryfile. There's also a curtain shop, plant nurseries, and regular artisan craft fairs at the Hall.
The walking is the main draw. The Tissington Trail runs thirteen traffic-free miles along the old Ashbourne–Buxton railway, which carried passengers from 1899 until the sixties and was bought by the National Park in 1971. The surface is firm crushed limestone, flat and wheelchair-friendly, with cycle hire at both ends. The Limestone Way passes directly through the village, and a popular circuit links the trail with Dovedale's gorge and stepping stones, about ten minutes' drive away.
St Mary's has a 12th-century Norman core and a fine carved doorway sheltered by the porch: a tympanum with two small standing figures, arms akimbo, flanking a chequerboard pattern. It sits on the site of a former moated fortification and holds the FitzHerbert family monuments.
The FitzHerberts have owned the whole village since the fifteenth century. Francis FitzHerbert built Tissington Hall in 1609 where the moated fort had stood; its forecourt gates were made by the Derbyshire ironsmith Robert Bakewell, and Sir Richard FitzHerbert, the 9th Baronet, lives there now.
Tissington is thought to be the birthplace of Derbyshire well dressing. Each Ascension Day the wells are packed with clay and pressed with flower petals into biblical scenes. The tradition, written down from 1817, is linked to the village escaping the Black Death, credited to the purity of its spring water.
The Domesday surveyors called it Tizinctun and valued it at four pounds in 1066 and two pounds in 1086. It had gone down.
There is no station; Ashbourne is four miles south down the A515, and the buses are the limited rural kind. So the water keeps running from the culvert to the pond, the ducks keep to it, and the stone turns red with Virginia creeper in autumn.
